Should humans set foot on Mars dirt in the next few decades, I doubt our ultra-connected future-Earthlings would want anything less than to watch the event via a high-speed, high-definition (3D?), surround-sound direct link to the Red Planet's surface. We'll want to see every grain of Mars dust in the air, hear every astronaut's boot crunch in the regolith and experience the emotion felt by the small band of humans exploring an alien planet for the first time in history.
Who knows, our first Mars astronauts might even want to do a spot of micro-blogging — or whatever the mid-21st Century equivalent may be — as they document that historic moment, transmitting data over tens of millions of miles back home for the consumption of billions of viewers.
PHOTOS: When Discovery News Met Mars Rover 'Curiosity'
But what if the infrastructure of today's Deep Space Network (DSN) — only three radio antennae located in the U.S., Australia and Spain — has simply been upgraded, where mission communications are priority and bandwidth is too low to even consider streaming* video (let alone interplanetary status updates or app downloads)?
Well, there's a guy from Google who might have an answer for our data-hungry space future.
"Father of the Internet"
Speaking at the Interlop 2011 conference on Tuesday, Vint Cerf, chief Internet evangelist for Google and the man known as one of the "fathers of the Internet," set out his priorities for the world's online future. But the discussion wasn't restricted to Earth.
According to Information Week reporter Paul McDougall, Cerf chatted with reporters during a Q&A about the need for an "Interplanetary Internet," and how the system might be envisaged. "We need a set of protocols that work on interplanetary distances, TCP/IP does not," Cerf is quoted as saying after his keynote speech at the event being held at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas this week.
This isn't a new development, however. Cerf has been working closely with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for the last few years, testing systems that may be used to expand an Internet-like system into interplanetary space, finding a standardized Internet protocol that every satellite, lander, rover and astronaut can hook up to (the blogging Mars astronaut scenario imagined above would come much later).
Creating a dependable means of transmitting data throughout the solar system would have obvious benefits for communicating with our armada of robotic missions, but should President Obama's plan of sending humans to Mars in the mid-2030's come to fruition, we'd also have a standardized infrastructure in place that could be utilized.
