After reading the story this week that NASA and Google are working on a way to extend the Internet beyond the confines of our planet was intriguing.  Of course I love hearing about anything that has to do with space exploration, and the concept of extending the Internet into space is interesting and strange at the same time.  Of course, if that first manned mission to Mars ever does happen, the journey is no doubt going to be a long one (several months at least), being able to browse the Internet would be nice .

Now…according to the article in the Ottawa Citizen about this, it will take nearly three minutes for the signal to travel from the earth to the source.  I guess instant messaging and real time communication are somehow out of the question.

What was interesting, is that the key technological hurdle needing to be overcome is the ability for a signal to be smart and be able to deal with disruptions and connection problems.  The new concept is called “Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN.  If a signal is blocked, the server can sense this, can save the content and send it on when the way is clear.”   We are constantly building web applications that rely on communication with other systems, sometimes asynchronously.  While there are mechanisms that can deal with disruption to a certain extent, this concept is interesting in that one could be sure that a transmission would arrive eventually, even if the system accepting the message isn’t available immediately.

I’ll be interested to see if this is one of those space program advances that actually helps us on earth, or if its just a cool idea that doesn’t yield any practical application.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 at 7:19 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Web Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.