Streaming and texting on the Moon: Nokia and NASA take 4G to space

Streaming and texting on the Moon: Nokia and NASA take 4G to space

Sending a message to the Moon? Streaming on Mars? It may not be as far as you think.

That’s the joint vision of NASA and Nokia, which have teamed up to establish a cellular network on the Moon to help lay the building blocks for a long-term human presence on other planets.

A SpaceX rocket will launch this year – the exact date is yet to be confirmed – bringing a simple 4G network to the Moon. The lander will install the system on the south pole of the Moon and then it will be controlled remotely from Earth.

“The first challenge in getting the network up and running is having space-qualified cellular equipment that meets the appropriate size, weight and power requirements, and is used without technicians,” Walt Engelund, deputy associate administrator for programs at NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, told CNN . No less challenging, it has to operate in the harsh lunar environment with extreme temperatures and radiation.

The 4G network unit is being built by Nokia’s Bell Labs using a variety of off-the-shelf commercial components. It will be loaded onto a lander made by the US company Intuitive Machines, and once deployed it will connect the lander via radio equipment to two rover vehicles with their own special mission: to find ice.

One of the vehicles, the Lunar Outpost rover, will explore an area known as the Shackleton Connecting Ridge, while the other, the Micro-Nova rover, will plunge into the crater to scan for evidence of an unprecedented close-up of the Moon’s ice.

The images of the ice — transmitted back to the lander and then Earth in near real time via cellular networks — will be a world first. Lunar ice can be used to create breathable oxygen, and even fuel that can eventually be used to launch Mars missions from the Moon.

For NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon this decade, cellular connectivity is invaluable.

Currently, astronauts talk to each other by radio, but NASA wants a lunar communications system capable of supporting high-resolution video and science data, Engelund said — especially as the Artemis mission becomes more sophisticated.

“Being able to communicate on the Moon is important to Artemis – as important as other mission elements like power, water to drink and air to breathe,” Engelund said.

“Ultimately, this effort will help create a lunar communications network that could give our explorers the ability to beam back scientific data, consult with mission control and talk to their families, as if they were walking down the street using their cellphones.”

It could lay the groundwork for an extraterrestrial internet not dissimilar to Earth’s. Personal devices can connect to such networks, allowing space colonists to use smartphones that can access all the apps and services available to those on Earth.

NASA chose Bell Labs as part of its Tipping Point initiative, a series of partnerships with companies to develop technologies for future missions that position them for a key role in the future space economy.

Bell Labs was given a $14.1 million grant in 2020, and in January, Nokia was selected by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to begin working on a communications services infrastructure that will eventually serve as “the framework for a lunar economy. ”

“The lunar economy of the future will rely heavily on communications technology to collect and analyze data, share information, and maintain and control operations,” Thierry Klein, president of Bell Labs Solutions Research, told CNN.

“This includes maintaining a semi-permanent or permanent human presence on the Moon, as well as automated robotic operations for transportation, resource mining, mineral processing and scientific data collection.”

There are potential commercial benefits for worldly ventures as well.

If the network can withstand a trip to orbit, then deploy and survive autonomously amid the vacuum of space, wildly fluctuating temperatures and cosmic radiation, it will be able to survive in the harshest locations on Earth — such as polar ice caps, deserts or offshore platforms.

“Especially when it comes to remote deployments, industrial sites, public safety, emergency response, disaster recovery or defense, it is very beneficial to have compact, low-footprint networking equipment that can be easily transported and used anywhere,” Klein said.