NASA Tests New Deep Space Cyber-Net

NASA has announced it has successfully tested the first deep-space communications network. The new network, modeled on the Internet, was able to transmit scores of space images between Earth and a NASA science spacecraft located more than 20 million miles away. Dubbed the “Interplanetary Internet,” the software protocol was a joint venture between NASA and Vint Cerf, a vice president at Google, that began in 1998. However, it was a team of engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., that used Disruption-Tolerant Networking to transmit the images.