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The need for state-of-the-art communication networks in space is even more pressing than the need on Earth.
Photo description | IM-2 Mission in Low Lunar Orbit 1.
Credit | Intuitive Machines
The Intuitive Machines Athena lander mission to the moon has officially been declared "dead" after landing on its side in a crater where it is unable to generate sufficient power for the planned mission.
However, in the short time that the lander systems remained operational, the first broadband cellular network—the so-called Network in a Box (NIB)—was successfully booted up and operated without issue during the allotted time.
This represents a critical first step toward creating the foundation to allow machines and humans to communicate and collaborate to build a future multi-planetary existence for humanity. Thierry Klein, president of Bell Labs Solutions Research, which developed the critical networking technologies from their terrestrial cousins, said, "This has been a crazy dream that has taken almost a decade to become reality."
In order to establish the right conditions for microbial, plant or human life on any other celestial body, an enormous amount of pre-work needs to be undertaken by intelligent machines that would be responsible for a multitude of tasks such as exploration (to find the optimal sites), mining (to excavate the elemental and energy sources), construction (of processing plants, farms, habitation and the connecting infrastructure) and control (of the resultant environment and the associated systems). And these machines and systems would necessarily be intelligent, as they will be required to operate in an environment with a "planet/world model" that is both unfamiliar and hostile to humans, and at distances from Earth that result in unacceptably long delay times for human control from Earth.
So, despite the uncertainty surrounding AI usage here on Earth, one of the undisputed areas for AI systems and robotics is in space exploration and the establishment of human settlements on other celestial bodies via terraforming: the process by which the four critical elements of temperature, water, energy and elemental sourcing required for biological life are created. In short, AI is a foundational technology for the future of humanity beyond Earth.
In many ways, this is analogous to how humans communicated and cooperated (and utilized machines) to build terrestrial civilization; in this future, intelligent machines and agents will communicate and cooperate (and work with humans) to create the foundations for extraterrestrial civilizations.
The first step on this historic journey happened yesterday. The IM-2 mission was created with the goal of analyzing the lunar surface and the "dark side" of a crater to look for water in these areas that are permanently shaded from the sun. Water is not only fundamental to all life but can also be a source of elemental oxygen for respiration and hydrogen for fuel and so can provide three of the four essential ingredients for terraformation. NASA's Lunar Trailblazer, which enjoyed an Uber-like rideshare on the same launch, has been deployed to lunar orbit where it will help map the distribution of the different forms of water on the moon.
Despite the setback experienced by the Athena mission during landing, the importance of the successful establishment of the first network based on terrestrial cellular technologies should not be overlooked. The need for state-of-the-art communication networks in space is even more pressing than the need on Earth, as uncrewed missions require high reliability, long-range wireless communications to support autonomy and the dynamic interconnection of robotic systems and embedded AI systems, allowing them to cooperate to construct the necessary systems to support longer-term human presence. Moreover, for upcoming crewed missions, astronauts need to be able to interact with robotic AI machines to allow the necessary control of these machines, as well as the ability to work together on tasks that require uniquely human skills.
Robots and rovers have previously been deployed on the moon and on Mars, but these machines were largely autonomous and connected over proprietary, specialized communication links to support remote command and control and data transmission. The challenge in deploying terrestrial technologies on celestial bodies arises from exposure to extremes of temperature and radiation on the moon's surface due to the absence of an atmosphere and magnetosphere on the moon. In addition, the size, weight and power (SWAP) requirements of deployed systems are critical to any mission, due to the load and effective cost of the associated mission payloads, driving the need to miniaturize every element and compress an entire network into a single "box." "We have completely reimagined the cellular network, resulting in a 10x reduction in size, weight and power, and the ability to withstand the uniquely harsh environment of space," says Klein.
The communications technologies deployed as the cornerstone of the Athena mission were developed by Bell Labs, the renowned American hub of innovation, that over the last 100 years invented many of the foundational technologies and theorems that underpin current communications and computing systems, as well as digital audio and visual capture and compression systems. I started my career as a member of technical staff at Bell Labs working on the physics and chemistry of semiconductor and optical devices, and had the privilege to be president of Bell Labs for nine years.
The first space-specific technology was created by Bell Labs with the launch of the first communication satellite, Telstar-1 in 1962, to provide voice, data and TV broadcast transmission across the Atlantic. Bell Labs' technologies and expertise then played a pivotal role underpinning the NASA Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions.
In addition to Bell Labs scientists winning 11 Nobel prizes for their technological breakthroughs, Yann LeCun's pioneering work on Convolutional Neural Networks for AI at Bell Labs was recognized with the Turing Award in 2018.
This iconic American-led institution, celebrating its 100th birthday this year, continues to produce innovations that underpin the terrestrial and extraterrestrial present and future of humankind.
There are also fundamental technological questions that need to be answered, for example, regarding the propagation of radio-frequency waves on the lunar surface, and whether non-line-of-sight communication that will be required for communication into and out of deep craters operates the same way as on Earth. These measurements are critical to allow development of an optimized model of communications in such extraterrestrial environments, to allow these technologies to be adapted for future large-scale, ultrahigh-bandwidth, mission-critical operation.
The immediate next steps will be to take the learnings from the current mission and apply them to the Artemis III mission, which will be the first time humans have returned to the moon in more than 50 years. This mission will further the exploration of lunar water supplies, with a weeklong stay by astronauts wearing next-generation spacesuits equipped with these communications modules, allowing voice, telemetry, biometric data, high resolution images and streaming video from the astronaut suits back to Mission Control.
Looking further ahead, Klein said, "Rather than each mission bringing its own network, a permanently installed communication infrastructure will be installed on the moon and any mission devices, machines or humans will become temporary subscribers on that network." And beyond the moon is Mars, for which the communication needs are even more challenging because there is a 20-minute delay between Earth and Mars, rendering real-time control from Earth impossible. "This will require the creation of a Martian cloud computing and communications platform," says Klein.
And, with these foundations, we will be well on the way to the imagined human-AI symbiotic future that is literally out of this world.
