NASA has taken the next step toward establishing an interplanetary Internet connection, after successfully testing the first deep space communications network with the help of a ship 20,000 miles from Earth. With the help of Disruption-Tolerant Networking software, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California managed to transmit dozens of space images to and from the spacecraft.

The Interplanetary network is an ambitious project that has a lot of challenges to deal with, starting with the speed of light delays due to enormous interplanetary distances, but also disconnections and disruptions, which can occur when a spacecraft moves behind a planet, or during solar storms. But it has also a lot of things that can make it possible and contribute to it, such as the existence of numerous space ships that can act as nods for the most sophisticated communications system ever built.

Vint Cenf, vice president at Google Inc. and the “father of the Internet,” collaborated with NASA for this project for the past decade, working on the Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol. The DTN is very different from the normal Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), and as NASA explained, does not assume a continuous end-to-end connection.

Normal Internet protocol is not used to dealing with disruptions in connectivity, and basically assumes there is an end-to-end route that it can use to send data. But in space, with delays that can last anywhere between three-and-a-half and 20 minutes, the DTN basically forces each node to keep the data packets until they can be safely sent to another node, in a ‘store-and-forward method.’ This ensures that the information does not get lost along the way if there is no available nod to pass it on to, enabling the information to reach the final destination.

“In space today, an operations team must manually schedule each link and generate all the commands to specify which data to send, when to send it, and where to send it,” explained Leigh Torgerson, manager of the DTN Experiment Operations Center at JPL. “With standardized DTN, this can all be done automatically.”

NASA engineers have been working for years to find ways of using instruments, rovers, ships and satellites as nodes, with capabilities of communicating with a certain degree of independence and autonomy.

The demonstrations of the DTN protocol began earlier in October, when NASA started sending data twice a week by using its Epoxi spacecraft (which is on a mission to encounter Comer Hartley 2) as a Mars data-relay orbiter. For now, NASA reported a total of 10 interplanetary nods, and said the experiments will continue. The agency also announced that next summer it will begin a wide demonstration using the DTN software aboard the International Space Station.