NASA hires Nokia to build first 4G network on the Moon as part of plan to boldly go back to lunar surface by 2024 NASA has hired Nokia to build a 4G network on the Moon, paying the telecoms manufacturer $14.1m to set up a communications system that will give astronauts voice, data, triangulation, and video-on-demand. This little detail was among 14 contract awards from the space agency for its planned Project Artemis Moon landing in 2024 …
The Nokia Moon 4G base station is actually now almost off-the-shelf stuff, because it was originally prepared for a private German Moon project that went bancrupt (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTScientists). The BTS was flight-ready, but the launch was canceled.
So whatever missed deadlines there will be, they will NOT happen because of the 4G hardware!
How far are you expecting them to travel?
From the article: “deployable hopper lander capable of carrying a 1kg payload more than 1.5 miles.” - that implies to me that they're working on a 1.5 mile radius.
Probably not coincidentally, the horizon on the moon is taken as being around 1.5 miles away. (that's based on eyes at 5'7)
Oh I dunno I can sort of see it now...
"Alexa, play 'Walking on the moon' by 'The Police'"
* bo, boop *
"Alexa, play 'Walking on the moon' by 'The Police'"
* bo, boop *
"AAAAAHHHHHHHHH! YOU F&@£ING S+%&ING WASTE OF SPACE! AAAAAAHHHHHHH!!"
* did you mean 'Rage Against The Machine'? *
Will the moon have its own country code? We can't use the letters for MOON on the keypad because +66 is already taken by Thailand. What about +LUN (+586)? Nope, it's taken by Venezuela. Knowing the Americans, they'll introduce it into the NANP and give it a US area code. I'm sure the Chinese won't be happy about that.
So something neutral. Like +890. There are ten unused country codes from 890 to 899 - maybe these could be used for different networks on the moon. This would be a fantastic money-making opportunity. But you'll always have people complaining about the delay and asking if anything can be done about it.
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I can just see the next generation of moonwalkers out there for the first time, using the 4g network.
Astronaut Fred spots something very interesting some distance away from the lander module and pulls out his mobile phone (hopefully not activated by fingerprint recognition) to report his exciting find.
He lifts the phone up to the side of his helmet and says....
"Damn, didn't spot that communication problem, did they."
There seems to be a lot of hubbub going on about the Moon all of a sudden. Where's the money to put all that stuff in rockets to get it there ?
There is no real political will to go back to the Moon. There is scientific will, but scientists don't have any money.
Then you have Musk, be he wants to go to Mars, not the Moon.
I don't see any of that stuff being used on the Moon before a looong time.
At the distance of 384.400 km on average there is little to no risk of signal interference from Earth or towards the Moon with my best knowledge. With no frequency plan for the Moon, NASA is going to have a wide range of frequency to use. I am guessing NASA is going to use something that is used in the United States already or is going to be used by 2024 and has high data ability for 4G network and that is up to 1Gbps speeds locally.
There are some clues that FM and Television signals might be usable on the Moon. But looking for an answer for that question didn't give me a clear answer for that question.
When I was writing the comment it was meant as FM and VHF/UHF signals from Earth to the Moon. I don't think however that such station would be able to be picked up on Earth if it was broadcasting on the Moon. But radio armatures have been doing signal bouncing off the Moon for few decades, it works but not without a lot of problems and signal pathway problems.
NASA won't have any problems getting signal from the Moon since they can get a signal from beyond Pluto from a 12W transmitter that New Horizon uses at 8 - 12Ghz.
If they want 1Gbps via 4G, they'll be using a lot of carriers, carrier aggregation and MIMO. Vanilla SISO LTE in 20MHz of spectrum (the largest a single carrier can be) offers ~75Mbps @ 64QAM.
They'll probably have it a bit easier as they won't be having large numbers of mobiles to worry about, so the RF schedulers will be quite lightweight, and the "atmospheric loss" in the propagation model will be greatly reduced (also presumably it will all mostly be line of sight, perhaps antennas built into the space suit). I don't think they'll have that much trouble streaming 4K video, if they wanted to.
Frequency plan? Probably the higher frequencies as the range is unlikely to be a worry, and no worry about getting indoor coverage.
Smashed screens will be rarer, thanks to the moon's decreased gravity. Opportunity for sales of rubber cases on the moon will be poor. I predict that in moon shopping centres, there won't be those small stands where they sell phone cases and replace broken screens. That'll be just one of many differences you'll notice when shopping on the moon.
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