ESA designing interplanetary web
Baku, April 19 (AZERTAC). Reliable Internet access on the Moon, near Mars or for astronauts on a space station? How about controlling a planetary rover from a spacecraft in deep space? These are just some of the pioneering technologies that ESA is working on for future exploration missions. In the future, rovers on Mars or inhabited bases on the Moon will be supported by orbiting satellite fleets providing data relay and navigation services. Astronauts will fly to asteroids, hundreds of millions of kilometres from Earth, and they’ll need to link up with other astronauts, control centres and sophisticated systems on their vessels. All of these activities will need to be interconnected, networked and managed.
Since 1982, experts from ESA, NASA and other major space organisations and industry have met periodically to develop new, open data communication standards as part of the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems. In the future, inter-satellite communication requirements are predicted to grow, and spacecraft should be capable of establishing powerful radio links with each other - even while orbiting Mars at thousands of kilometres per hour. In May 2008, ESA’s Mars Express served as a crucial data relay node for NASA’s Phoenix lander during descent and landing on the Red planet. Mars Express is set to repeat the feat in August with NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory. In December 2011, ESA’s worldwide tracking station network was recruited to provide three hours’ daily data contact for Russian mission controllers operating the Phobos-Grunt mission en route to Mars (the probe failed soon after launch for unrelated reasons).
In October, an astronaut on the International Space Station will practise remotely controlling a test rover located at ESA’s Operations Centre to simulate orbiter-rover communication links at a planet like Mars. This, too, requires robust communication links to allow astronauts, robots and control centre to work efficiently together. These and other topics are set to be discussed at the CCSDS conference in Darmstadt on 16-19 April, which will bring together international space organisations from 20 spacefaring nations including ESA, NASA, ASI, CNES, Roscosmos, DLR and JAXA.
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