211–220 of 224 posts
Can the astronauts actually phone home using some kind of link from their network to ours?
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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…
Leap seconds are based on conditions here on Earth and wouldn't really be needed on Mars or Venus. They might have different peculiarities though, and they wouldn't be usable on Earth. In that situation, a single point of reference would be useful for conversions.
Am I the only one wondering what the point of this is?
Imagine you need robots and machines to work remotely on the moon without a human inside a cabin controlling things, without a line of sight and in a low power, low footprint form factor Now you have 2 options: 1. Use off the shelf Quectel and Qualcomm devices and off the shelf existing embedded hardware. Then test and develop using common terrestrial networks and harden it for radiation. Pack and deploy. 2. Use some…
The 4G/5G question seems absurd the way it was posed as a matter of mere reliability. Don't we care more about range and the odd characteristics of the moon and the vacuum of space?
4G speeds ought to be more than enough for a lot of traffic -- it's not that the astrounauts will be streaming movies off Netflix when they're outside or anything.
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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?
Perhaps America should change its country code from +1 to say +889, and open up +100 through +199 for others.
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Nokia is a highly profitable company. I’m not seeing the comparison. Their loss making division was the phones division which was sold off a while ago.
Well, I wouldn't say highly profitable. Unless I am reading incorrectly they haven't been making much of profit lately. Maybe the good parts make a hefty profit but alas, as a whole it has been a pretty sad sight to see.
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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…
Well, the general idea seems usable enough; X time units from a specific reference point. Conversion is then done to whatever local time-keeping system you might have. Leap seconds are based on conditions here on Earth and wouldn't really be needed on Mars or Venus. They might have different peculiarities though, and they wouldn't be usable on Earth. In that situation, a single point of reference would be useful for…
We'll have a cell network on the moon and still lack basic broadband access to many rural areas.
> We'll have a cell network on the moon and still lack basic broadband access to many rural areas. Probably, but then the share of the population on the moon is nondecreasing, unlike that in the rural areas at issue.
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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.
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> The bigger problem is that NASA's culture is so meeting heavy that it's hard to justify these kinds of low importance events on my calendar. Not sure if you are speaking from experience, but if that is the case, and this is true, then NASA as an organization seems to be a poor judge of what's important.
Yes, from experience. It's not that we don't know what's important, it's that it's all important and I have to find time to actually write code every now and then too. The real problem is just that we're all very busy and it's not really possible for everyone in the agency to have even a cursory awareness of everything that's going on. Even now with everything being virtual, I get invites to brown-bag type events pro…