NASA projects could speed transmissions from the final frontier

While social-media mavens and space buffs thrilled to the first Tweets from outer space last week, NASA was working on the kind of network improvements that will be necessary if astronauts are to use any online tools more demanding than Twitter.

According to Space.com, a news Web site that covers NASA and other space-related topics, NASA is trying to fuse its three aging networks into a faster, more efficient data carrier. Until it increases bandwidth, space explorers, whether human or robotic, will have to forgo things such as posting high-definition videos to YouTube.

The overhaul is expected to increase data rates from space by a factor of 50, "so that a Mars mission squeaking by on a few megabits per second might someday get as much as 600 megabits per second, if not more," Jeremy Hsu wrote on Space.com.

The speed increase isn't just for providing exciting images to earthlings. It will also advance NASA's scientific mission, Hsu reported.

"Imagine what you can accomplish with a single mission instead of several spacecraft flying over several years to collect the data," said Badri Younes, NASA's deputy associate administrator for Space Communications and Navigation, who was quoted in the article.

NASA has also been working to improve communications on other fronts. Late last year, the agency announced the first successful tests of an "interplanetary Internet," through a partnership with Google. Using software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, engineers transmitted dozens of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft that was about 20 million miles from Earth, according to an article in SatNews Daily.