Interplanetary Internet in works

Associated Press

NEW YORK — To reach colonists on Mars, you just might attach "mars.sol" to the e-mail address. For retrieving images from one of Jupiter's moons, a file transfer from a "europa.sol" site might be in order.

The space missions making that possible may be years or lifetimes away, but steps toward extending the Internet's reach already are in the works. The first component, a short-range transceiver, hitched a ride on the Mars Odyssey, which was launched in April and is due to reach the Red Planet in October.

As envisioned, an internet on Mars could connect various surface landers and orbiting satellites. Additional internets could appear elsewhere, all linked to form a giant Interplanetary Internet.

And techniques for extending networks into the remote reaches of outer space could ultimately prove useful for extending the current Internet into remote regions on Earth.

Researchers, who released a 58-page proposal in mid-May, scheduled workshops during meetings of the Internet Society in Stockholm this week.

Deploying all the hardware could take decades. But then again, the Internet on Earth has taken 31 years to build and is still under construction.

"You have to start somewhere," said Vinton Cerf, an Internet founding father and adviser to the space project.

"For many of us, the idea of building an Interplanetary Internet sounds like Fantasyland, but it's straightforward engineering. It's stuff we know how to do."

Adrian Hooke, the project's manager, said the Interplanetary Internet would expand one component at a time, primarily by hitching rides on spacecraft built for other projects.

The concept is still on the drawing boards, though, with no timetable or even a formal commitment at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Hooke, who works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, expects key scheduling decisions this year.

NASA has a Deep Space Network of three radio dishes on Earth scanning for signals from its spacecraft. The Interplanetary Internet would standardize components so that spacecraft could talk to one another, instead of only to Earth.

Remember the Mars Pathfinder lander and its rover, Sojourner? The rover took more than 500 pictures from the Mars surface and communicated with the lander using customized protocols. But from there, the images went directly to Earth.

With the Interplanetary Internet's standardized protocols, the lander could have beamed signals to an orbiting satellite from a previous mission. Satellites, which generate more power than surface landers, could then amplify the signal. That ultimately means more pictures with better quality.

NASA still would have to post images and data to computers on Earth for public viewing.

Distances and other resource constraints won't make it practical for space buffs to directly request pages from a Web server on Mars. Standards would, however, let NASA reuse its components and share access with other countries, scientists or commercial space ventures.