NASA awarded Nokia $ 14.1 million to deploy a 4G cellular network on the Moon.
The grant is part of $ 370 million in contracts signed under NASA’s “Tipping Point” selections, intended to promote research and development for space exploration.
“The system could support communications from the lunar surface at greater distances, higher speeds and provide more reliability than current standards,” NASA noted in its contract award announcement.
According to United Press International, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine in a live broadcast said the space agency must rapidly develop new technologies for living and working on the moon if it is to achieve its goal of having astronauts working on a lunar base by 2028.
“We need power systems that can last a long time on the moon’s surface, and we need habitable capacity on the surface,” Bridenstine said.
Nokia’s research arm, Bell Labs, provided more details in a Twitter thread. The company intends for the network to support the wireless operation of lunar rovers and navigation, as well as video streaming.
“Working with our partners at @Int_Machines, this innovative network will be the critical communications fabric for data transmission applications, including monitoring lunar rovers, real-time navigation over the lunar geography, and video streaming of high definition, “Bell Labs said in a tweet.
This is not Nokia’s first attempt to launch an LTE network on the moon. This was planned to be done in 2018 in collaboration with PTScientists, a German space company, and Vodafone UK to launch an LTE network at the Apollo 17 landing site, but the mission never took off.
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(Business Standard staff may have only modified the title and image of this report; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
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