A group of engineers and scientists are working in U.S on an ambitious project to bring about an inter-planetary Internet system, which is claimed to supply communication links between the Earth and Mars. Led by Vinton G Cerf, popularly known as a ‘Father of the Internet’, and at present Vice-President and chief Internet evangelist for Google, the can-do project is ‘on the go’ at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena near Houston in conjunction with the Advanced Research Project Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Cerf, while talking on the ‘Future of the Internet’, said,
The gameplan of the technology protocol — InterPlaNet (IPN) is to move the Internet off this planet. As part of the NASA Mars mission programme, the project aims to have by 2008 a well-functioning Earth-Mars network that serves as a backbone for an inter-planetary system of Internets. We are working on standardizing the protocols to enable spacecraft communicate and share information across the solar system
In due course of time, the can-do project is claimed to envision an inter-planetary Internet relays in polar solar orbit to observe the majority of the planets and their inter-planetary gateways for most of the time, if not always. However the thought for an inter-planetary Internet system brought to mind in 1998, JPL, NASA and other agencies moved jointly to finance the project for expanding the capabilities of the Internet into the solar system. The scenario of consisting such a system also corroborated with their interest to perk up communication with robots in bottomless space.
