The US space agency NASA has introduced a new dimension to space communications by successfully testing the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet. The engineers at NASA have transmitted number of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about 20 million miles from Earth. They used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) for transmission of mages.

 

Referring to the new technology as interplanetary Internet, the team leader of the project, Adrian Hooke said that this new achievement will enable to create a totally new space communications capability. The DTN software used in the test was developed by NASA in collaboration with Google Inc. The high-tech software uses different methods to send information. Unlike normal Internet's Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, the DTN is designed to store data instead of discarding them when a destination path cannot be found.

 

Each network node of the high-end software keeps the information as long as necessary until it can communicate safely with another node. NASA is reported to have entered in a deal with Google about 10 years ago. The engineers at NASA took one month to transmit data which became successful on November 19. The success of this experiment will boost NASA to go for such kind of space projects in future.