Zeenews bureau
New Delhi: NASA along with the European Space Agency (ESA) has successfully used an interplanetary internet to send commands to a robot on Earth.
Astronaut Sunita Williams onboard the International Space Station (ISS) used NASA's Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol to control a Lego Mindstorms robot in Germany.
This technology will facilitate communication in the future for interplanetary explorations.
"The demonstration showed the feasibility of using a new communications infrastructure to send commands to a surface robot from an orbiting spacecraft and receive images and data back from the robot," said Badri Younes, deputy associate administrator for space communications and navigation at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
NASA's DTN has been designed specifically to deal with the long distances and the accompanying problems likely to arise.
First Published: Saturday, November 10, 2012, 00:49