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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

#181

Post by colanderman »

spiffytech wrote: post #124
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…

It depends on which layer you're asking about addressing. You can represent anything non-relatavistic on top of the Unix epoch, and it could be handled as simply as using alternate time zones. The big problems come from huge Earth assumptions about interval duration and interval sequencing being violated. A lunar day is 29.5 Earth days. Does the lunar calendar use solar days, and just have absurdly long weeks and yea…

Unix time is not really great for any scientific purpose; it defines each day to have exactly 86400 seconds. (So, eventually you have problems with leap seconds.)

UTC is better, because at least it is aware of leap seconds, but performing any calculation spanning a year's end involves consulting a database of leap seconds. Notably these aren't determined much in advance, so such calculations involving future dates will also involve leap-second errors.

TAI is best (for non-relativistic non-sidereal purposes), as it is not adjusted to account for leap seconds. You can calculate with it without trouble.

(All three of the above are based on the atomic SI second, so despite their differences, their seconds tick synchronously.)

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

#182

Post by 0xffff2 »

xenospn wrote: post #96
Miner49er wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you consider decent? Gigabit only? You can get at least 60-100 Mbps in most towns, as long as you aren't out of town. Probably gigabit if you're willing to pay a lot. Spectrum is the main option in the big towns. Looks like you can get gigabit from them in the big towns for $110/month for the first 12 months. Not sure what it would go to after that. If you live out of town, or in a really small town, you're g…

When I was looking for property in WA and OR there was absolutely no way to get internet (even DSL was a big maybe) outside of towns.

Depending on the area, you can't even get internet outside of full cities. I own a house that's a few miles outside of a small town in Oregon. When I moved up here from the bay area recently, I had to rent a second house in the nearest city 30 miles south because there is absolutely no terrestrial internet service even within the city limits of my ~700 person town.

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

#184

Post by tehjoker »

ttul wrote: post #112
Mo3 wrote: post #83

That’s funny. Can’t even get LTE in the countryside but sure, build a network on the moon

Well, the same argument can be made for lots of things. As in, why not provide poor kids with better school lunches when we've spent $100B to build the space station?

The real answer is to take from the military budget ($700B/yr) instead of from the civilian space budget.

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

#185

Post by bigbubba »

fsloth wrote: post #136
tengbretson wrote: post #14

Cool and all, but I'd settle for a cellular network in Wyoming.

I don’t think that has anything to do with Nasa or Nokia?

Contrary to what British newspapers might like you to believe, NASA is always capitalized.

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

#187

Post by pilsetnieks »

bluGill wrote: post #156
pilsetnieks wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nokia isn't doing the phones, that's maybe why you're getting the downvotes; On the second point, however, I kinda agree. People are mentioning some of the +8XX international codes but we should really go hierarchical. A separate higher level code for Earth, for Moon, other planetary bodies; then eventually higher level codes for solar systems, etc. I really doubt they'll even be doing phone numbers, though.

There is no point in doing solar systems - the turn around time to the next star is ~ 8 years. Nobody will make a phone call with that sort of latency. It will be email (or videos) if anything at all. Even in this solar system only Venus and Mars can you even think about a phone call from earth - and then only for a few days when the orbits align closely. The rest of the time the latency will be too bad. Even when it…

I know, I was being facetious. It's possible they won't even do phone numbers for the moon - LTE gives a data connection, and you use whatever protocol on top, VoIP, Signal, Whatsapp, Facetime, whatever.

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

#188

Post by peterburkimsher »

qz2 wrote: post #128
wh313 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's Barycentric Dynamical Time, which takes time dilation into account: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_Dynamical_Time NASA has actually thought through this problem and created SPICE, which lets you convert between different time systems, some relativistic and some not, as well as doing conversions between various reference frames: https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/index.html

I have enough problems dealing with time on this planet. This is going to break a lot of software and software developers instantly :)

https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...

I'm very thankful for the creators of https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ handling time zone weirdness, etc, so that I can still get to Zoom calls on time (usually). I don't know how the Moment developers can ever think it's "done" - "We now generally consider Moment to be a legacy project in maintenance mode. It is not dead, but it is indeed done."

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

#189

Post by spiffytech »

colanderman wrote: post #181
spiffytech wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on which layer you're asking about addressing. You can represent anything non-relatavistic on top of the Unix epoch, and it could be handled as simply as using alternate time zones. The big problems come from huge Earth assumptions about interval duration and interval sequencing being violated. A lunar day is 29.5 Earth days. Does the lunar calendar use solar days, and just have absurdly long weeks and yea…

Unix time is not really great for any scientific purpose; it defines each day to have exactly 86400 seconds. (So, eventually you have problems with leap seconds.) UTC is better, because at least it is aware of leap seconds, but performing any calculation spanning a year's end involves consulting a database of leap seconds. Notably these aren't determined much in advance, so such calculations involving future dates wi…

In astronomical contexts there are good alternatives to the epoch (like TDB, mentioned in another comment). I interpreted the top-level question as relating to day-to-day measurements and representations of time, presumably for use by extraterrestrial humans, since the commenter asked in the context of handling time zones and units like weeks and months which are irrelevant in a scientific context.

UTC is not a great choice for a universal interplanetary time system, as it's designed to work on just one planet, for just one calendar system. It'll work fine while we're asking humans on Earth to oversee robots on the Mars, but will fall down pretty quickly once humans take permanent residence on celestial bodies that don't have Earth's rhythms.

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