NASA Develops Solar System Internet, DTN Acts Like Household Wi-Fi

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has finally revealed its new technology installed at the International Space Station (ISS), which should provide interplanetary internet that could cover the entire Solar System in the future. The new system, dubbed as Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN), acts like any household's Wi-Fi signal.

The DTN or the space Internet will essentially function as the spectacle through which messages from space could be channeled to ground stations on Earth. It will make communications between ISS and NASA headquarters easy and reliable.

DTN or the space Internet operates by providing a reliable and automatic store and forward data network. It will store partial bundles of data in nodes along a communication path, Futurism reported.

However, during the transmissions from the ISS, the data experiences slow signal or, at the extremes, even loss of important space information. This occurrence will be because of objects in space that are large and numerous, such as planets, spacecrafts, radiation waves, among others.

The delay-and-disruption-tolerant networks installed in the ISS can now improve electronic communications by storing data when a connection is interrupted and forwarding it to its destination using relay stations. Some of the destinations that could share the information from the ISS include ground stations on Earth, robotic spacecraft, or space probes, rovers, and even manned colonies.

DTN or the space Internet technology has been tested for years, so in order to advance with the improved electronic communications in space, it is installed this month in the Telescience Resource Kit (TReK). It is a software suite for researchers to transmit and receive data between operations centers and their payloads aboard station.

Adding this service on the mechanical structure of DTN will significantly enhance mission support applications, such as operational file transfers.

The DTN or space Internet protocol suite is still under active development, NASA reported. In addition to smooth development on interplanetary network security, research goals for the DTN activity will focus on testing and evolving important network services including naming and addressing, time synchronization, routing, network management and class of service.