Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Space Wi-Fi

One thing about going on a cruise for vacation that is always hard to get around is the terrible reception you get for your phone.  On a five day cruise I had usable signal twice, when I arrived and when I left the ship.  If being 70 miles off the coast is bad, imagine being 56 million km or more from Earth. Do you think you would get good reception? I would think not. NASA is setting out to remedy their reception problem with some super technical Broadband.
NASA plans to set up a laser communications system that would change the communication speeds from something comparable to dial-up to broadband speeds.  There are a few obstacles NASA will have to overcome; if they place a satellite orbiting around Mars then the laser should always point to Earth.  But Earth will be in a different spot in the sky from minute to minute.  Also if there are any kind of problems in communication then they will need to have a place to store the information that wasn't successfully received.  these problems will be looked into and solved in the near future by NASA scientists who are not giving up even after huge budget cuts.

Read more here: http://news.discovery.com/space/web-streaming-from-mars-110824.html
and here: http://io9.com/5834120/nasa-is-using-lasers-to-broadcast-from-space-in-hd

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.