You may not get a good signal everytime you get over your claustrophobia and on a lift. However, worry no more about staying on the grid, if you ever land on the moon, because the one place you’d expect will be people-free, won’t be anymore. With Vodafone’s plans of establishing a 4-G network on moon, all the humanly pleasures of posting duck faces on Instagram can be achieved seamlessly. Just kidding. Only smart people get to go to moon. Kidding again.
Vodafone will partner up with Nokia to support a mission by PTScientists in 2019. The mission will land two Audi lunar quattro rovers on the Moon, which will be connected to a base station in the company’s landing module (Autonomous Landing and Navigation Module (ALINA)) via 4G. “The great thing about this LTE solution is that it saves so much power, and the less energy we use sending data, the more we have to do science”, said Robert Böhme, CEO of PTScientists.
The technology behind the network will be provided by Nokia,which will create a space-grade Ultra Compact Network that will be the lightest ever developed and will weigh less than a bag of sugar. The 4-G network will help Audi lunar quattro rovers to communicate and transmit scientific data and HD videos while they study NASA’s Apollo 17 lunar rover vehicle.
Vodafone testing indicates that the base station should be able to broadcast 4G using the 1800 MHz frequency band and send back the first ever live HD video feed of the Moon’s surface, which will be broadcast to a global audience via a deep space link that interconnects with the PTScientists server in the Mission Control Centre in Berlin.
“This project involves a radically innovative approach to the development of mobile network infrastructure,” said Hannes Ametsreiter, chief executive of Vodafone Germany.
Successful executions of plans like these make humans the most dominating species in the universe, so far.
For original article: http://www.rttnews.com/2867095/vodafone-nokia-to-create-first-4g-network-on-moon.aspx?refresh=1