As per the latest study which has revealed that NASA exploring the possibility of building a Wi-Fi network on the moon. This comes in efforts to find out the solution to the insufficient internet access part of the US.
Mary Lobo, NASA’s director of technology incubation and innovation at Glenn Research Center, said that this will give them a great opportunity to develop solutions to the challenges they face while sending the astronauts to the Moon under Artemis.
This study is very important because the crew, rover, mining equipment, and science instrument will definitely require trusted communication links to an Artemis basecamp and back to the Earth. The study was conducted by NASA’s Compass Lab.
The Artemis program, which was presented last year, focuses on land people on the Moon for the first time since ever 1972. The program aims to liftoff an unscrewed mission on Moon in 2021, trailed by a crewed moon flyby in 2023. Then finally, the lunar landing by 2024.
Around 31 percent of the households in Cleveland have no broadband access, according to a report presented by National Digital Inclusion Alliance. Based on these statistics, the Greater Cleveland Partnership then approaches NASA to investigate technical barriers of digital dissimilarity and understand if there is any chance to use the moon to solve the digital divide.
The Compass team estimated how a terrestrial network could function in a nearby Cleveland neighborhood, to analyze how a network might appear on the moon. Then the engineers find out that attaching Wi-Fi routers to 20000 lampposts in Cleveland could provide internet access to each and every household in any given neighborhood.
Steve Oleson, Compass Lab lead at NASA Glenn, said that the results of the study will be shared with NASA’s mission planners for future Artemis missions and possible future basecamp designs. Though, this is at the theoretical phase.
