AA #8

NASA Engineers Bring the Internet to Astronauts


“Hello Twitterverse...”

Astronaut TJ Creamer sent the first live tweet from space aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Engineers used the station’s communication link, which heavily relies on the Ku radio band. The Ku band is the most common frequency spectrum used for satellite communication. A software modification was simply needed to transform the communication network to personal internet use. “The system will provide astronauts with direct private communications to enhance their quality of life during long-duration missions by helping to ease the isolation associated with life in a closed environment,” NASA stated. This is one step closer to creating vast communication in space. Vinton Cerf, one of the co-inventors of the TCP/IP internet protocol, has been working on a protocol that could integrate various communication devices in space. He has been working alongside NASA for over a decade attempting to make these devices work together like on Earth. However, this has many obstacles. Transmission scrambling solar storms, periodical blackouts and the enormous distances could add up to a large amount of corrupted or lost data. Overcoming these obstacles outside of Earth’s atmosphere is a challenge. “It’s great that astronauts can tweet from space, update their Facebook accounts and browse a friend’s Flickr album, but this personal internet upgrade is not exactly a revolution in communication.”



E, Ortlip. “NASA Engineers Bring the Internet to Astronauts.” IEEE Spectrum. 2/3/2010. 2/17/10 <http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/space-flight/nasa-engineers-bring-the-internet-to-astronauts>