Earth Orbit
Earth orbit is sufficiently nearby that conventional protocols can be used. For example, the International Space Station is connected to the terrestrial Internet. The space station also serves as a platform for research focused on human health and exploration, technology testing for enabling future exploration, research in basic life and physical sciences and Earth and space science. NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have used an experimental version of interplanetary Internet to control an educational rover from the International Space Station. The experiment used the DTN protocol to demonstrate technology that one day may enable Internet-like communications that can support habitats or infrastructure on another planet.
DTN was designed to enable standardized communications over long distances and through time delays. At its core is something called the Bundle Protocol (BP), which is similar to the Internet Protocol, or IP, that serves as the heart of the Internet here on Earth. The big difference between the two is that IP assumes a seamless end-to-end data path, while BP is built to account for errors and disconnections — glitches that commonly plague deep-space communications. The space station's current Expedition 33 consists of six crewmembers: NASA astronauts Williams and Kevin Ford, Japanese space flyer Akihiko Hoshide and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Malenchenko, Evgeny Tarelkin and Oleg Novitskiy.
Read more about this topic: Interplanetary Internet
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