Sarah's Shiny Science: surfing the interplanetary-wide-web

Whoever said bad things come in threes was right. First Russell Brand leaves the BBC over *those* phone calls, then the lovable John Sergeant is pushed out of quits Strictly Come Dancing, and now my stint as Shiny Shiny's science guru has come to an end. But here's one final column to go out with a Big Bang (pun intended, sadly).

Science and technology go together hand-in-hand: scientific breakthroughs lead to new technologies and improved technology helps to further science. For example, it was a group of scientists working in a lab called CERN who first created the internet, and now the smart guys at NASA are using the internet to help with their space missions.

To date, NASA's mission control has had to manually schedule communications with spacecraft and specify exactly which data to send, when to send it, and where to send it. But last week NASA successfully tested a Deep Space Communications network (DSN) - a kind of interplanetary internet - that would arrange all of their communications automatically.

You're probably wondering why NASA didn't catch-on to this internet-fad-thing earlier. While I'm sure the mission control guys have been using the internet for years to update their online status as 'Yey - it launched!!!' and to download Aerosmith's 'I Don't want to miss a thing', it couldn't be used in spacecraft communications.

The normal internet's Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) assumes a continuous end-to-end connection. But this isn't always possible in space, as planets and space weather can get in the way of communications. But the new interplanetary internet, DSN, makes allowances for disruptions to communications and saves the messages until they can be sent.