Now onwards Internet can be used from the space to control machines on earth! The European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA jointly conducted an experiment in that direction, recently. An interplanetary internet has been used by Sunita Williams, the astronaut at the International Space Station (ISS) to send commands to control a rover in Germany. The new technology named Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol, could be a future way to communicate with astronauts on other planets like Mars!
The work on the DTN was first proposed a decade ago by Vint Cerf - one of the creators of the internet on Earth.The technology was first tested in November 2008, when Nasa successfully transmitted images to and from a spacecraft 20 million miles away with a communications system based on the net.
The experiment demonstrated that it is possible to send commands to a surface robot from an orbiting spacecraft and receive images and data back from the robot.
