The Moon Becomes a New Wi-Fi Hotspot

by: Sofia Riñon

Aside from air, water and fresh vegetables, what would you need to survive on the moon? One thing that would likely feature high on the list is a decent, reliable wireless internet. And thanks to a group of researchers from MIT and NASA this kind of connectivity could be within the realms of possibility.

When our brave explorers arrive on the dusty plains of the moon, they’ll be able to live tweet the experience, and even take a selfie for Instagram.

Complimentary Wi-Fi is so common that a business advertising its “hotspot” in the window seems somewhat outdated. But a new hotspot location should impress even the most jaded among us: For the first time, scientists have demonstrated it’s possible to beam a wireless Internet signal across the 238,900 miles separating Earth from the moon.

They have successfully used lasers to send a broadband wireless signal to the moon—with a connection fast enough to stream high-definition video. Admittedly, there’s a sparse lunar audience for YouTube – but this is big news for those interested in pushing the limits of data communication technology to enable deep-space exploration.

Getting the signal through the Earth's atmosphere is difficult, so scientists used four separate telescopes based in New Mexico. Each telescope is about 6 inches in diameter and is fed by a laser transmitter that beams information in coded pulses of infrared light.

Since our atmosphere bends the signal as it travels to the moon, the four telescopes transmit the light through different columns of air, each with different bending effects.

This improves the chances that at least one of the signals will hit the intended satellite. It's kind of like the space version of those Wi-Fi routers with multiple antennas, and the way they can improve the quality of your connection.

The destination here is not the Moon itself, but a satellite currently orbiting the moon, equipped with a telescope, which will collect the laser beams and will focus it into an optical fiber. Then, a photo detector turns the pulses of light into electrical pulses and from there they are converted to data through conventional techniques.

The team has transmitted data across the 384,633km distance between Earth and the moon at a rate of 19.44mbps and has also managed to download data at a rate of 622mbps.

"Communicating at high data rates from Earth to the moon with laser beams is challenging because of the 400,000-kilometre distance spreading out the light beam," Mark Stevens of MIT Lincoln Laboratory stated. "It's doubly difficult going through the atmosphere, because turbulence can bend light-causing rapid fading or dropouts of the signal at the receiver."

Just why the Moon needs Internet isn't really clear, especially as there haven't been any humans on the lunar surface since 1972. Perhaps if the link had been established a few months earlier, China's Jade Rabbit lunar rover could have posted a few lunar selfies and its sad dying message on its Facebook page via Wi-Fi.

So, in light of all that, there’s really only question that remains… “What’s the password?”