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Nokia selected by NASA to build cellular network on the moon

reuters.com

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Re: Nokia selected by NASA to build cellular network on the moon

#131

Post by kibwen »

dmurray wrote: post #121
secondcoming wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't they just bury the box containing the circuitry under a few feet of lunar soil?

Burying things is a lot harder than just dropping them in place. Normally you'd pour a concrete foundation for something like this, so you'd be doing some excavation work anyway, but on the moon there's no need for a foundation because there's no wind.

> no need for a foundation

Moonquakes do seem to occur, and although they're not as damaging as earthquakes I wonder if they're still something that engineers need to worry about.

Re: Nokia selected by NASA to build cellular network on the moon

#132

Post by LeoPanthera »

Seb-C wrote: post #97

Is anyone aware of a date/time representation system that would work universally (including extraterrestrial places)? I just have been curious about this question for long. Sure, we could keep an earth referential on a moon base, but then what about Mars? As a software developer it is already difficult to always get dates/times properly with timezones, now imagine places which does not have 24 hours per day or the sa…

"International Atomic Time" (TAI) is probably the logical choice. It's the same as UTC, but without leap seconds.

Maybe the "stardate" of the future will simply be Unix Time, but based on TAI.

Re: Nokia selected by NASA to build cellular network on the moon

#133

Post by kibwen »

nickik wrote: post #22
ortusdux wrote: post #17

I would love to see some mock-ups of orbital patterns for a moon based starlink-like network. How does the relative lack of an atmosphere affect things? How large of a constellation do you need when the orbital body is 1/4 the size of earth?

I would not be very hard to do. The principle problem is just that the moons gravity is unstable so low flying objects would need quite a bit of fuel to stay in the correctorbit. However, since the distance to earth anyway is the limiting factor you don't need low flying sats at all. A handful of sats could do a pretty good job with global coverage.

> the moons gravity is unstable

How so? Even if, say, its mass were very unevenly distributed, there should still be a center of gravity around which to orbit, yeah?

Re: Nokia selected by NASA to build cellular network on the moon

#134

Post by reaperducer »

iso1631 wrote: post #110
reaperducer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like it, but +66 is Thailand already. Maybe Thailand could be reassigned. Like when Mexico dropped out of +1 to become +52. Or maybe instead of +, we dial & to get off-planet.

You're suggesting an entire country of millions of people change their phone numbers because America decides that it wants to create a new international area code which happens to match the word "moon" in English?

You're suggesting an entire country of millions of people change their phone numbers

Yes. It's been done before. And considering the available space, eventually the moon could have more people on it than Thailand.

because America

What makes you think that only one country will use phones on the moon?

Re: Nokia selected by NASA to build cellular network on the moon

#135

Post by fsloth »

hydrogenbonds wrote: post #107

I see nice things like this and I wonder if they could’ve spent that money on actually making better service and proving more coverage in hard to reach areas.

Who? Nasa? Nasa is not in telco business the last time I lopked. And it’s not certainly Nokia’s business to provide cellular coverage. They provide the hardware but the actual coverage is implemented by network providers installing the hardware after purchase.

Re: Nokia selected by NASA to build cellular network on the moon

#137

Post by _Microft »

kibwen wrote: post #133
nickik wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not be very hard to do. The principle problem is just that the moons gravity is unstable so low flying objects would need quite a bit of fuel to stay in the correctorbit. However, since the distance to earth anyway is the limiting factor you don't need low flying sats at all. A handful of sats could do a pretty good job with global coverage.

> the moons gravity is unstable How so? Even if, say, its mass were very unevenly distributed, there should still be a center of gravity around which to orbit, yeah?

You can read about this here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)...

Re: Nokia selected by NASA to build cellular network on the moon

#138

Post by JdeBP »

_Microft wrote: post #120
reaperducer wrote: post #20

Does this mean the ITU is going to assign the moon a country code? I vote for +6666 (MOON). Who decides what parts of the moon get what area codes? Imagine how long it will take to get Orange to instal a landline in a crater!

Suggestion: doubling the international call prefix to 'dial out' of Earth's networks and followed by a new code to dial into the Moon's.

There is no single "the" international call prefix for the whole world, and quite a lot of telephony operates with E.164 format internally.

Re: Nokia selected by NASA to build cellular network on the moon

#139

Post by azinman2 »

sushicalculus wrote: post #127
dr_orpheus wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SPICE is pretty awesome. I wish that more people in the aerospace industry were aware of, including people AT NASA. I work at a company contracting on NASA projects and a couple weeks ago I had to correct their code because they weren't accounting for the leap second offset between UTC and GPS correctly. When I asked why he wrote his own function instead of using SPICE he responded "what's SPICE?". Literally people i…

Need to bring back some of those brownbag lunch & learn events, starting with "SPICE up your clocks"! Except people might not be comfortable sitting in the same room these days

No reason you can’t have virtual tech talks

Re: Nokia selected by NASA to build cellular network on the moon

#140

Post by FlyMoreRockets »

nimbius wrote: post #47
Nokinside wrote: post #39

Radiation environment on the moon is worse than in the LEO. Earth's magnetic field is not protecting in the Moon. It's unclear how much rad-hard they need if they don't use it for anything safety critical. Rad-hard 90nm SoC for 4G/LTE should be relatively straightforward. Or maybe they use redundancy and use already available few generation old chipsets. Changes for thermal management and testing eats most of the bud…

it doesnt need to last long enough for the first permanent moon colony, just long enough to get the investors excited and bump the stock. frankly i think a moon colony thats anything but underground is a laughably myopic idea. the delta T for the moon is pretty insane.

Delta T? Please explain. I'm familiar with DeltaV, but pretty much all the delta T usages I have seen refer to a time interval.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v

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