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The Internet will go interplanetary

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NASA finished first tests on a system that

could one day be used to automatically relay information between Earth, spacecraft, and astronauts, without the need for humans to schedule transmissions at each point. …

For the test, dozens of images of Mars and its moon Phobos were transmitted back and forth between computers on Earth and NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft. The craft, which sent an impactor into Comet Tempel 1 in 2005, has been renamed “Epoxi” now that it its mission has been extended to search for extrasolar planets.

Further tests will begin on the International Space Station next year.

[Story: New Scientist; picture: NASA/JPL]

2 thoughts on “The Internet will go interplanetary”

  1. So, I assume that the top level domains in an ‘interplanetary internet’ in the Sol system would be single-letter codes designating planets and other major bodies or zones in the system, such as:

    .y = mercury
    .v = venus
    .e = earth
    .m = mars
    .j = jupiter
    .s = saturn
    .u = uranus
    .n = neptune

    Then:

    .a = asteroids?
    .c = comets?
    .p = plutoids?
    .k = kuiper belt objects?
    .o = oort cloud objects?
    .i = inter-stellar-bound objects? (like Finney & Jones’ Fastships and Nomads )

    any others?

    And, once it does go interstellar, would there be a .sol domain?

    So, this blogsite’s address would be: futurismic.com.e.sol

    Cool!

    Of course, there is also the issue of something being transient, like a spacecraft in orbit around a body before it goes to another body (like a mission to Mars, etc), so perhaps there would need to be a sub-domain for this case. And what about the naming convention for the primary star, and any others (like Alpha Centauri)? The speculations can be endlessly fun …! 🙂

    Cheers,
    Dr Joe 🙂

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