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CU Researchers Working On Outer Space Internet

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Jul 7, 2009 7:54 pm US/Mountain

CU Researchers Working On Outer Space Internet

Reporting
Terry Jessup
BOULDER, Colo. (CBS4/AP) ― Researchers at the University of Colorado are working with NASA to extend the Internet to outer space to help an expected growing number spaceships communicate with each other and with Earth.

"Ultimately, it's really what will enable space exploration to proceed in a more efficient fashion," said Kevin Gifford of Boulder's BioServe Space Technologies

Gifford says the technology, dubbed Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN), was installed on a payload sent to the International Space Station in May. DTN sends messages in bundles, streamlining the current, cumbersome point-to-point system that requires manual scheduling and programing to send information.

"Once they have that technology, then they're going to be able to really use the Internet on the moon just as if they were on the Earth's surface, only with a little bit more delay," Gifford said.

In just a few months, astronauts on board will even be able to use Twitter -- live.

"They could use tweets from their iPod or iPhone and they would be received on Earth," Gifford said.

"Twitter and e-mail, Web observation, browsing, things like that is an exciting opportunity of something to do with the interplanetary Internet," Andrew Jenkins with the CU Engineering Center said.

DTN expands the initial work started a decade ago by NASA and Vint Cerf, longtime technology innovator and Google Inc.'s chief identifier of new technologies and applications.

The goal is for the interplanetary Internet to be in widespread use by 2014. NASA is shooting for another moon mission by 2020.

(© 2010 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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