Article Read Week 1
U.S. warships moving to monitor North Korea's planned rocket launch
By David Alexander | Reuters – December 6, 2012
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is shifting warships into position to track and possibly defend against a planned North Korean rocket launch while urging Pyongyang to cancel its second such attempt this year, the head of the U.S. Pacific Command said on Thursday.
Admiral Samuel Locklear, who commands U.S. forces in the Asia-Pacific region, said warships were being moved to the best locations to track the rocket during its launch and flight, which North Korea has set for sometime between December 10 and 22.
The United States is watching preparations for the launch "very closely," he told a Pentagon news conference. He said U.S. warships were being moved to monitor the rocket, as they were when Pyongyang attempted a similar launch in April.
"It should seem logical that we'll move them around so we have the best situational awareness," he said. "To the degree that those ships are capable of participating in ballistic missile defense, then we will position them to be able to do that."
Pyongyang says the launch aims to put a satellite into space. The United States and many other countries view it as a test of a long-range, nuclear-capable ballistic missile that would violate U.N. resolutions and further destabilize the Korean Peninsula. The North Korean launch attempt in April failed.
Locklear said the repositioned U.S. ships would help answer a series of questions.
"If they do violate the Security Council and launch a missile, what kind is it? What is it about? Where does it go? Who does it threaten? Where do the parts of it ... that don't go where they want it to go, where do they go? And what are the consequences of that?" he said.
The admiral said his main concern was reassuring U.S. allies that the United States was effectively monitoring the situation.
"We believe it is still contradictory to the U.N. Security Council resolutions ... because of the nature of the type of missile that they will be firing and the implications it has for ballistic-type of activity somewhere down the road and the destabilizing impact that will have on the security environment throughout the region," Locklear said.
He said there had been signs that the government of new leader Kim Jong-un would take a more "rational approach" to how it deals with its economy, its citizens and its international relationships.
Kim took power after the death of his father, former leader Kim Jong-il, on December 17. The anniversary of his father's death falls during the time frame set by North Korea for the rocket launch. Presidential elections in neighboring South Korea take place two days later, on December 19.
Locklear said while there was hope for a shift in North Korea's political direction, Pyongyang was once again poised to violate U.N. Security Council resolutions regarding its nuclear program.
"We encourage the leadership in North Korea to consider what they are doing here and the implications on the overall security environment on the Korean Peninsula, as well as in Asia," he said.
Article Read Week 2
Air & Space Smithsonian
December 3, 2012
Testing the Interplanetary Internet
Retrieved from http://blogs.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/2012/12/testing-the-interplanetary-internet/ on December 9, 2012
As part of the METERON project, astronauts operated the Mocup test robot in Darmstadt, Germany. Image: ESA
The first humans that head out to Mars might never set foot on the planet. Instead, they could orbit on a Martian space station, where the astronauts remotely command robots working on the planet’s harsh surface. Operating from an orbiting platform — one that’s already set up to support humans, because they flew to Mars inside it — would give the astronauts a wide field of view; they could send robots almost anywhere on the planet and change course as needed, without having to find the kind of safe route that people would require. Indeed, these robots would find it for us.
Astronauts are starting to test these techniques now, except instead of operating robots from low-Mars orbit, they’re driving Lego rovers in Germany from the International Space Station. In late October, then-station commander Sunita Williams opened a laptop and sent the terrestrial toy through a short obstacle course. The tricky part is not the remote operation itself, though it requires some training (no doubt the Mars Curiosity drivers could offer some tips), it’s the infrastructure needed to transmit the signal: the interplanetary Internet.
“The history of space communications is largely what we call point-to-point — we point a big antenna on Earth up at a spacecraft, squirt commands up to it, and we get telemetry back,” explains Adrian Hooke, NASA’s project manager for Space DTN (Disruption Tolerant Networking). He adds that the Mars Curiosity rover is a step ahead of this, using two Mars orbiters as communication relays. “But what we want is a more Internet-like system… of pretty ubiquitous communications, anywhere you want to go.”
You’re reading this blog post thanks to a nearly 40-year-old technology called Internet Protocol (IP). Information travels in packets, hopping from router to router, but if a router has nowhere to send the data because the next router is down, it simply discards those packets.
DTN, however, aims to be a more careful, and thus more reliable system. When mission control on Earth is waiting for a commander’s update from Mars, or when astronauts are carefully constructing our first Martian base from 200 miles up, they don’t want to risk losing any of that data forever if a router burps. So DTN uses Bundle Protocol (BP) — the IP of the interplanetary Internet. Here, when a router receives data packets, it stores them until the next hop becomes available. If the delays are large — due to the vast distances between planets, or because a Mars orbiter is on the far side of the planet — DTN can use a secondary system, called Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP), which will store the data even if the sender has to go offline before the transmission is complete.
When Williams instructed the Lego rover in Germany to move, the command went from her laptop to the space station’s communications terminal, where a DTN access point began, operated by the University of Colorado. Then it went to NASA’s fleet of tracking and relay satellites, which transmitted the data packets to ground stations in White Sands, New Mexico, then to NASA’s operations center in Huntsville, Alabama, and on to the University of Colorado in Boulder, where they hopped the pond to the European Space Agency’s user support center in Belgium, and finally to ESA’s operations center in Darmstadt, Germany. Then the Lego rover moved. Measurements confirming the movement then traveled the reverse route back to Williams.
“Each one of those was a DTN ‘hop,’” Hooke says. “Sunita steered the robot around some obstacles, and got some very basic data back from the rover…given all those hops, it probably took a couple seconds round trip. She probably saw the response three seconds after she sent the commands.”
For this test, NASA’s DTN team worked with ESA’s METERON project, Multi-purpose End-To-End Robotic Operations Network, which is focused on developing astronaut “telepresence” — operating robots remotely. The ESA hopes that in the coming year or so, astronauts will be tele-operating “Justin,” an android, from the space station.
Eventually, the DTN developed for space could be used by regular folks here on Earth in times of emergency, when communication links are disrupted or jammed, such as during a hurricane or terrorist attack. But NASA’s sights are set far from home. Hooke says interplanetary probes like the Saturn-orbiting Cassini and the upcoming Juno mission to Jupiter, could be repurposed by uploading them with DTN software after their science missions are done. That way, they can serve as Internet nodes throughout the solar system.
“There is nothing inherent in the network that can constrain how far out you can go. It’s more [constrained by] the patience of human beings to wait for a response,” he says.
U.S. warships moving to monitor North Korea's planned rocket launch
By David Alexander | Reuters – December 6, 2012
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is shifting warships into position to track and possibly defend against a planned North Korean rocket launch while urging Pyongyang to cancel its second such attempt this year, the head of the U.S. Pacific Command said on Thursday.
Admiral Samuel Locklear, who commands U.S. forces in the Asia-Pacific region, said warships were being moved to the best locations to track the rocket during its launch and flight, which North Korea has set for sometime between December 10 and 22.
The United States is watching preparations for the launch "very closely," he told a Pentagon news conference. He said U.S. warships were being moved to monitor the rocket, as they were when Pyongyang attempted a similar launch in April.
"It should seem logical that we'll move them around so we have the best situational awareness," he said. "To the degree that those ships are capable of participating in ballistic missile defense, then we will position them to be able to do that."
Pyongyang says the launch aims to put a satellite into space. The United States and many other countries view it as a test of a long-range, nuclear-capable ballistic missile that would violate U.N. resolutions and further destabilize the Korean Peninsula. The North Korean launch attempt in April failed.
Locklear said the repositioned U.S. ships would help answer a series of questions.
"If they do violate the Security Council and launch a missile, what kind is it? What is it about? Where does it go? Who does it threaten? Where do the parts of it ... that don't go where they want it to go, where do they go? And what are the consequences of that?" he said.
The admiral said his main concern was reassuring U.S. allies that the United States was effectively monitoring the situation.
"We believe it is still contradictory to the U.N. Security Council resolutions ... because of the nature of the type of missile that they will be firing and the implications it has for ballistic-type of activity somewhere down the road and the destabilizing impact that will have on the security environment throughout the region," Locklear said.
He said there had been signs that the government of new leader Kim Jong-un would take a more "rational approach" to how it deals with its economy, its citizens and its international relationships.
Kim took power after the death of his father, former leader Kim Jong-il, on December 17. The anniversary of his father's death falls during the time frame set by North Korea for the rocket launch. Presidential elections in neighboring South Korea take place two days later, on December 19.
Locklear said while there was hope for a shift in North Korea's political direction, Pyongyang was once again poised to violate U.N. Security Council resolutions regarding its nuclear program.
"We encourage the leadership in North Korea to consider what they are doing here and the implications on the overall security environment on the Korean Peninsula, as well as in Asia," he said.
Article Read Week 2
Air & Space Smithsonian
December 3, 2012
Testing the Interplanetary Internet
Retrieved from http://blogs.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/2012/12/testing-the-interplanetary-internet/ on December 9, 2012
As part of the METERON project, astronauts operated the Mocup test robot in Darmstadt, Germany. Image: ESA
The first humans that head out to Mars might never set foot on the planet. Instead, they could orbit on a Martian space station, where the astronauts remotely command robots working on the planet’s harsh surface. Operating from an orbiting platform — one that’s already set up to support humans, because they flew to Mars inside it — would give the astronauts a wide field of view; they could send robots almost anywhere on the planet and change course as needed, without having to find the kind of safe route that people would require. Indeed, these robots would find it for us.
Astronauts are starting to test these techniques now, except instead of operating robots from low-Mars orbit, they’re driving Lego rovers in Germany from the International Space Station. In late October, then-station commander Sunita Williams opened a laptop and sent the terrestrial toy through a short obstacle course. The tricky part is not the remote operation itself, though it requires some training (no doubt the Mars Curiosity drivers could offer some tips), it’s the infrastructure needed to transmit the signal: the interplanetary Internet.
“The history of space communications is largely what we call point-to-point — we point a big antenna on Earth up at a spacecraft, squirt commands up to it, and we get telemetry back,” explains Adrian Hooke, NASA’s project manager for Space DTN (Disruption Tolerant Networking). He adds that the Mars Curiosity rover is a step ahead of this, using two Mars orbiters as communication relays. “But what we want is a more Internet-like system… of pretty ubiquitous communications, anywhere you want to go.”
You’re reading this blog post thanks to a nearly 40-year-old technology called Internet Protocol (IP). Information travels in packets, hopping from router to router, but if a router has nowhere to send the data because the next router is down, it simply discards those packets.
DTN, however, aims to be a more careful, and thus more reliable system. When mission control on Earth is waiting for a commander’s update from Mars, or when astronauts are carefully constructing our first Martian base from 200 miles up, they don’t want to risk losing any of that data forever if a router burps. So DTN uses Bundle Protocol (BP) — the IP of the interplanetary Internet. Here, when a router receives data packets, it stores them until the next hop becomes available. If the delays are large — due to the vast distances between planets, or because a Mars orbiter is on the far side of the planet — DTN can use a secondary system, called Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP), which will store the data even if the sender has to go offline before the transmission is complete.
When Williams instructed the Lego rover in Germany to move, the command went from her laptop to the space station’s communications terminal, where a DTN access point began, operated by the University of Colorado. Then it went to NASA’s fleet of tracking and relay satellites, which transmitted the data packets to ground stations in White Sands, New Mexico, then to NASA’s operations center in Huntsville, Alabama, and on to the University of Colorado in Boulder, where they hopped the pond to the European Space Agency’s user support center in Belgium, and finally to ESA’s operations center in Darmstadt, Germany. Then the Lego rover moved. Measurements confirming the movement then traveled the reverse route back to Williams.
“Each one of those was a DTN ‘hop,’” Hooke says. “Sunita steered the robot around some obstacles, and got some very basic data back from the rover…given all those hops, it probably took a couple seconds round trip. She probably saw the response three seconds after she sent the commands.”
For this test, NASA’s DTN team worked with ESA’s METERON project, Multi-purpose End-To-End Robotic Operations Network, which is focused on developing astronaut “telepresence” — operating robots remotely. The ESA hopes that in the coming year or so, astronauts will be tele-operating “Justin,” an android, from the space station.
Eventually, the DTN developed for space could be used by regular folks here on Earth in times of emergency, when communication links are disrupted or jammed, such as during a hurricane or terrorist attack. But NASA’s sights are set far from home. Hooke says interplanetary probes like the Saturn-orbiting Cassini and the upcoming Juno mission to Jupiter, could be repurposed by uploading them with DTN software after their science missions are done. That way, they can serve as Internet nodes throughout the solar system.
“There is nothing inherent in the network that can constrain how far out you can go. It’s more [constrained by] the patience of human beings to wait for a response,” he says.