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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

#121

Post by dmurray »

secondcoming wrote: post #81
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…

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.

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

#122

Post by dr_orpheus »

wh313 wrote: post #101
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…

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

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 in the same building as him maintain the SPICE toolkits.

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

#123

Post by ztjio »

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!

Why would it be 6666 and not 5862?

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

#124

Post by spiffytech »

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 years? Maybe the years are standard Earth length, they just don't use weeks or months. Does a lunar society have a shorter "not-day" that replaces the way Earth uses days, and now everything needs to handle this new unit of time? Do days still get measured as solar intervals, and we just decide it's okay for days to be longer than weeks on the moon, so it stays Tuesday for a month at a time?

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

#125

Post by mdifrgechd »

bouncycastle wrote: post #18

If there is intelligent life somewhere out there, when they travel to space, I wonder if they also insist on operating technology that is at least one generation back, for the reason of "proven reliability"? I'd say probably yes. If we ever get a visit from them, that "shmux semiconductor" will be the old model...

It's interesting to see you speculate that it would be a culture that prioritizes reliability. I could also imagine that it is more like the Vikings or Polynesians where some fishermen pushed technology further than before and ended up somewhere new. That kind of "bravery" or experimentation has sometimes played of in past circumstances much better than some kind of architected reliability / safety focused approach.

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

#126

Post by iso1631 »

JackFr wrote: post #93

It's crazy to think only three space programs have soft landed on the moon. And since the first in 1966, there have only been about 2 dozen soft landings on the moon. We tend to forget it's really hard to do.

I think the full list is

Luna 9, 13, 16, 17, 20, 21, 24 (1966-1976)

Surveyor 1, 3, 5, 6, 7 (1966-68)

Apollo 11,12,14,15,16,17 (1969-72)

Chang'e 3 and 4 (2013 + 2019)

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

#127

Post by sushicalculus »

dr_orpheus wrote: post #122
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

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

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

#128

Post by qz2 »

wh313 wrote: post #101
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…

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 :)

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

#129

Post by [deleted] »

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 :)

[deleted]
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