Private moon lander will carry Nokia’s 4G cell network to the lunar surface this year
Texting on the moon? For future lunar astronauts, that will very properly be a risk.
Nokia is growing a LTE/4G communications system for the moon, and its first piece of the community may launch as quickly as late this yr. {Hardware} for a simplified model of the community is because of launch late this yr as a part of the Intuitive Machine’s IM-2 mission, which is anticipated to land on the moon’s south pole.
Nokia’s tools, which is basically a “community in a field,” will join Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lunar lander with Lunar Outpost’s MAPP rover and Intuitive Machines’ Micro-Nova hopper, testing its viability over each close to and much distances.
Associated: Astronomers call for radio silence on the far side of the moon
“Like shelter, meals and life help, communications shall be a vital part of any future lunar or Mars mission,” Thierry Klein, president of Bell Labs Options Analysis at Nokia, stated in a statement. “As a substitute of ‘reinventing the wheel’ by making a proprietary community in house, we’re profiting from the identical state-of-the-art applied sciences that join billions of smartphones on Earth.”
In 2020, NASA awarded contracts to 14 firms to develop “tipping level” applied sciences to help the Artemis program; Nokia obtained $14.1 million to construct the primary mobile community on the moon. Somewhat than develop all-new expertise, Nokia is adapting its present {hardware} for the lunar atmosphere.
Ought to all go in response to plan, Nokia’s 4G/LTE lunar community would offer extra bandwidth than the standard ultra-high frequency (UHF) methods used for house communication. It will not solely make communications faster from astronaut to astronaut, but additionally for autonomous robotic methods on the moon. Plus, the community might finally be tailored for Mars — and upgraded to 5G in the future.
“Simply take into consideration the dimensions of operations on the moon over the subsequent 20 years. There shall be a number of missions in a single yr run by completely different house businesses and even business ventures. There shall be bases in several areas of the moon,” stated Klein.
“Having each single mission arrange their very own communications methods would make no sense economically. As a substitute, they might want to use the identical infrastructure in the identical areas and interlink all of the completely different bases on the lunar floor. That’s the position of a service supplier,” Klein added.
However not everyone seems to be thrilled by the concept of a cell community on the moon. Radio astronomers worry that such a community might create radio frequency interference (RFI) that disrupts radio observations.
However there’s nonetheless hope — operators like Nokia might theoretically shield sure frequencies, leaving radio observatories within the clear.
