Here's more in the second instalment.
The First Interplanetary Communication Link
Laser comm links to Mars!
The 5-watt laser NASA plans to test at Mars by the end of the decade is expected to transmit data at rates nearly 10 times faster than any existing interplanetary radio communications link. The difference, NASA officials said, will be comparable to moving from a dial-up modem to a broadband Internet connection.
But the new technology is not without its challenges and NASA says it could be decades before lasers are ready to take over as the primary means of communicating with spacecraft.
The U.S. military has plans to field a constellation of optical communications relay satellites in Earth orbit starting around 2012. Those satellites are intended to help the Pentagon deal with a bandwidth crunch that has been heightened in part by a growing fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles that are transmitting data-rich imagery.
NASA faces a bandwidth crunch of its own in deep space as more powerful spacecraft and instruments become reality. Highly reliable data links with fast transmission rates also are deemed critical to the human planetary expeditions NASA hopes to undertake. NASA is tackling some of the technical challenges facing interplanetary optical communications with the Mars Laser Communication Demonstration (MLCD) now in development at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.
It's like reading some sci-fi novel.
- Art Neuro
2 comments:
I like the quantum stuff. Good article. But is it baseball?
I doubt it.
It ain't politics either tho'.
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