Radio communications should travel perfectly through space, right? Well, not exactly, as it turns out. There’s plenty to interfere with radio communications away from the surface of Earth, including (but not limited to) cosmic noise and our planet’s fluctuating ionosphere that is perfectly capable of impairing the link between satellite and ground station.
To try and get around this problem, which could disrupt future space missions, researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Penn State University have been working with NASA to test what they call cognitive radios. These smart radios use artificial neural networks to adjust their settings in real time, optimizing their ability to stay in contact even under challenging circumstances. As such, they could be game-changers in difficult space environments where getting a human to reconfigure them may be next to impossible. In the team’s tests, the cognitive radios were able to maintain a clear signal between the International Space Station (ISS) and the ground.
“Our cognitive radio maps the relationship between the parameters and the performance values of the space communication system, as well as includes the environmental conditions such as the signal-to-noise ratio, using an approach called reinforcement learning neural networks,” Alex Wyglinski, professor of electrical engineering and robotics engineering at Worcester Polytechnic, told Digital Trends.
“This approach works by having the cognitive radio ‘agent’ continuously receive information from the space communication environment about how well everything is going — ‘rewards’ — and [the] current configuration of the communication system, [referred to as] ‘states,’” he continued. “The agent feeds this information into an ensemble of neural networks, which produces a set of potential actions to be performed by the communication system. The actions with the potential to yield the best performance [are] then applied to the space communication system.”
The concept of cognitive radios dates back to 1998. Several prototypes have been built over the years, including models by the U.S. Department of Defense. But building a cognitive radio for space turns out to be a bit more difficult. To put it mildly.
“For our proof-of-concept space cognitive radio system, we designed and built a framework that would enable robust communications in a space environment, which is something much more challenging relative to similar wireless applications on Earth,” Wyglinski explained.
Sven Bilén, professor of engineering design, electrical engineering, and aerospace engineering at Penn State, told Digital Trends: “Our system is unique in that we are the first in-space test of cognitive communications.”
The researchers recently wrote an article about their work for IEEE Spectrum.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.