If we get the ISS switched over to OPALS completely, the internet for the astronauts will speed up by a considerable amount - the OPALS team estimates it’ll be somewhere between 10 and 1,000 times faster than what they have now. As anyone who happens to have fiber optic cables for their internet can tell you, optical data rates are way better than the alternative.Īrtist's illustration of OPALS instrument firing a laser. OPALS is cool because it uses lasers, which means we’re switching from an analogue radio signal to an optical one. Opals stands for O ptical PA yload for L asercomm S cience, and it’s successfully gotten data down from the ISS to a listening station in California. The machinery for it was delivered by one of the SpaceX capsules in April, 2014, called OPALS. There is another potential upgrade to the internet in space being tested. Considering that the ISS has been going since 1998, this is a relatively recent upgrade. Interestingly, Twitter only became a part of ISS life in 2010! Before 2010, the access to the internet was pretty limited, so if an astronaut wanted to put something up online they would have to email it to the ground team via their radio connection, and the ground team could log into their account on their behalf and post it for them. Astronauts rate it “worse than dial-up” but it’s at least there, and lets them write emails, post pictures on twitter, and call home to their families. Unsurprisingly then, by all accounts the internet on the International Space Station is pretty slow. When you’re beaming a signal to space, and power drops with distance, the rate at which you can communicate also drops. However, there are limitations to how fast your radio-based connection can communicate, and one of the issues is distance from the source. To be more precise, typically we beam a signal up to a satellite and the satellite slings it over in the direction of the space station. We can beam a signal up to the ISS, which has an antenna which lets them receive it, and then their computers can download an email. The radio connection to the ISS isn’t L-band, it’s Ku band (12-18 GHz) and S band (2-4 GHz), but the principle is the same. This also means that the atmosphere won’t get in the way of shooting a signal up into space from the ground. Even more helpfully, the atmosphere doesn’t block radio waves, so you don’t have to worry about the air absorbing the signal you’d like to send out. (Your cars almost certainly still have radios in them, even if you plug them directly into an mp3 player instead.) Radio is pretty easy to set up, as you just need to have an antenna and a transmitter. Radio is a pretty straightforward means of broadcasting information, and we’re pretty familiar with radio for audio recordings. The vast majority of communication with the ISS happens via radio. There are some significant challenges with getting the internet set up in space, beginning with not being able to run a fiber-optic cable from ground to space, and we still don’t have a planetary scale wifi network yet, so getting a wifi hotspot in space is still a challenge. Since 2016, SpaceNet AG, an ISP, has been challenging a German law which provides for an obligation to store traffic and location data of all users without any reason and across the board, arguing it is incompatible with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.We covered some of the tricks behind NASA’s communication with spaceships a little while back, but the International Space Station’s internet access is pretty interesting.
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