Astronauts on the ISS can now surf the web!
Posted on: January 25, 2010
While an engineering marvel, up until now the International Space Station didn’t have a way to browse the Internet. Last week a softer update allowed astronauts to, you know, do Internet stuff!
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I would imagine having internet on the moon would be great. Giving you the feeling of being connected to the world.
agreed (second comment)
YIKES! 11:00 PM….. might be able to see a tad bit of it.
2:10 — 3 light minutes is only when Mars and Earth are at their closest. Their maximum separation exceeds 20 light minutes.
Because we all know why the internet is realy realy great! …
is a computer on earth the best way to solve the problem, lets take mars
its a 6 min round trip, if you had a computer on earth to load the whole page and then send that page in one big packet instead of little packets that would speed it up a bit,
but more likely it would be better to send a list of instructions for the computer on earth to do , then while it went through just downloading the websites and sending them in one big packet to mars, so someone needs to come up with a new protocol
Then do skype or other social media ;D.
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I just want to add something to your example about the problem of internet on Mars:
3 minutes one way delay (6 minutes round-trip) is only true when Mars is in opposition to the sun (as seen from earth). And then this would be only true during such times as the opposition in 2003, when the distance between Earth and Mars was only about 55 million km. The average distance during the Orbits (of Earth and Mars) would be 78 million km – resulting in almost 9 minutes round trip time.
But we are still talking about oppositions. If Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the Sun, the distance increases to 400 million km. That’s a whopping 22 minutes transmission delay – ONE WAY.
So it’s a good thing, that Spacevidcast is available on demand!
looks like there network admin has been slacking
It’s really interesting to think about the speed of light limit, and how that would affect interplanetary or even interstellar communication in the more or less distant future.
Downloading pr0n LOL
It affects us today in our drive planning for the Mars Exploration Rovers.
Why don’t we add Satlelight relay to power up and send it on its way like Hub in space between Moon or Mars.
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So they can now watch SVC!
space fairing civilization = Internet in space? LOL!
@ralpher05 Among many other things, yes. Just putting people on another planet for flags and footprints does not make us a space civilization. If we truly want to live and work across the galaxy, then we’ll need to learn to communicate across said galaxy too. The Internet is part of that as it is a communications vehicle.
@Drsharky43 The issue isn’t relay stations but rather the speed of light limitations, which is where the 6 minute figure comes in… And even that is a best case scenario. It gets worse from there based on where Mars is in relation to Earth.
@Buttmunch5000 it’s still 6 minutes. Anyway, you could put a proxy on the moon that would cache the accessed data, so repeated access of the same data will result in much faster load.
Anyway, on the earth we have fiber optic, light is used to transfer the data. Maybe we could use beam of light to send data through vacuum of space. At the speed of light, 1.5 seconds is needed for the light to arrive from earth to the moon, that’s much better
The martians need subspace/FTL radio communications
cool, but the ping is most probably too bad for counter strike… too bad… would like to shoot an astronauts head off ;o)
Well, what about a washing machine? ISS doesn’t have a washing machine!