Nokia selected by NASA to build cellular network on the moon | Hacker News Reader

Nokia selected by NASA to build cellular network on the moon

reuters.com

441 pointskungfudoi208 comments

Is anyone aware of a date/time representation system that would work universally (including extraterrestrial places)?

I just have been curious about this question for long. Sure, we could keep an earth referential on a moon base, but then what about Mars?

As a software developer it is already difficult to always get dates/times properly with timezones, now imagine places which does not have 24 hours per day or the same weeks/months/years durations...

Mars calendar, each year has 24 months: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_calendar

Solar system time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_Coordinate_Time

Alternatively:

* https://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/content/martian-calendar

There's Barycentric Dynamical Time, which takes time dilation into account: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_Dynamical_Time

NASA has actually thought through this problem and created SPICE, which lets you convert between different time systems, some relativistic and some not, as well as doing conversions between various reference frames: https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/index.html

SPICE is pretty awesome. I wish that more people in the aerospace industry were aware of, including people AT NASA. I work at a company contracting on NASA projects and a couple weeks ago I had to correct their code because they weren't accounting for the leap second offset between UTC and GPS correctly. When I asked why he wrote his own function instead of using SPICE he responded "what's SPICE?". Literally people in the same building as him maintain the SPICE toolkits.

Need to bring back some of those brownbag lunch & learn events, starting with "SPICE up your clocks"! Except people might not be comfortable sitting in the same room these days

No reason you can’t have virtual tech talks

Comfort won't be much of a factor since most NASA centers are completely work from home for non-mission-critical work for the indefinite future. Nonetheless, we do have a ton of these kinds of things going on all the time. The bigger problem is that NASA's culture is so meeting heavy that it's hard to justify these kinds of low importance events on my calendar.

> The bigger problem is that NASA's culture is so meeting heavy that it's hard to justify these kinds of low importance events on my calendar.

Not sure if you are speaking from experience, but if that is the case, and this is true, then NASA as an organization seems to be a poor judge of what's important.

Yes, from experience. It's not that we don't know what's important, it's that it's all important and I have to find time to actually write code every now and then too. The real problem is just that we're all very busy and it's not really possible for everyone in the agency to have even a cursory awareness of everything that's going on.

Even now with everything being virtual, I get invites to brown-bag type events probably 3-4 time per week. I can go to one or two, but there's no way I can fit every single one into my schedule.

Interesting. Do you think there's a chance for more balance or does it seem just a natural result of the demands of the job?

There are a couple of issues at play. One is that there's so much interesting stuff going on that I (and most of my colleagues) tend to volunteer ourselves for lots of projects, which results in us going "deep" on a couple of projects at the expense of not having enough time to go "wide" by attending lots of talks that aren't directly related to our own work. That part's on me and I really could make more time in my schedule if I just said "no" more often (but again, I don't say "yes" because I'm pressured to do so, I say "yes" because the work is really fun and interesting!).

The other question is why we have so many meetings per project. That one's tougher to tackle and I don't really have an answer. The one thing that I have identified is that we're very in to making sure that everyone has their say on things before taking action. That's a good thing overall, but it also leads to tremendous meeting bloat. A meeting that would only take 5 minutes if everyone restricted themselves to discussing critical issues before making a decision regularly takes a full hour in which we examine every pitfall, no matter how minor.

Interesting, it sounds like in this case it's mostly a good problem to have - even ensuring all voices are heard is good, from a sound engineering perspective, which I'd imagine is important for NASA's missions!

I wonder if there would be a benefit in your case if folks had to follow a similar process to the one Amazon requires for its meetings (this may be something NASA already does, but I will admit I'm projecting a bit here and am wishing my organization required some writing before calling for a meeting):

> We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.” Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.

> ...

> Here’s what we’ve figured out. Often, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not the writer’s inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! They’re trying to perfect a handstand in just two weeks, and we’re not coaching them right. The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can’t be done in a day or two. The key point here is that you can improve results through the simple act of teaching scope – that a great memo probably should take a week or more.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518...

I have enough problems dealing with time on this planet. This is going to break a lot of software and software developers instantly :)

https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...

I'm very thankful for the creators of https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ handling time zone weirdness, etc, so that I can still get to Zoom calls on time (usually). I don't know how the Moment developers can ever think it's "done" - "We now generally consider Moment to be a legacy project in maintenance mode. It is not dead, but it is indeed done."

UT0 is the basis for other times derived from motion of stars or extragalactic radio sources.

On the Moon and Earth you can just use UTC like ISS does.

UTC works just fine, or TAI if you don't want to deal with leap seconds. (UTC is international atomic time (TAI) offset by leap seconds to keep in sync with earth's rotation)

Once you get into relativistic effects you need something better, but for practical purposes UTC and TAI are just fine for the foreseeable future. The days just become a meaningless abstract concept.

It depends on which layer you're asking about addressing. You can represent anything non-relatavistic on top of the Unix epoch, and it could be handled as simply as using alternate time zones.

The big problems come from huge Earth assumptions about interval duration and interval sequencing being violated. A lunar day is 29.5 Earth days. Does the lunar calendar use solar days, and just have absurdly long weeks and years? Maybe the years are standard Earth length, they just don't use weeks or months. Does a lunar society have a shorter "not-day" that replaces the way Earth uses days, and now everything needs to handle this new unit of time? Do days still get measured as solar intervals, and we just decide it's okay for days to be longer than weeks on the moon, so it stays Tuesday for a month at a time?

Off earth you have a launch criterion and accumulated subjective seconds. That's your onboard time.

There are no days, weeks, months, years. Just count the seconds and make sure everyone knows the epoch you started at.

Now, let's suppose you have a permanent settled outpost on Luna. You still use accumulated seconds as your time basis, but for casual conversation, you can talk about any Earth time marking that makes sense to you -- next Tuesday, or March 20th, or "in three months". You might occasionally care about whether it's bright or dark outside, but the tidal lock means that local weeks and months really aren't useful.

The hard thing is when you actually care about both the time on Earth and the local time/date/season of a planet you are interacting with naturally. Let's hypothesize a terraformed Venus, and while we're at it, let's change the axial tilt from 2.mumble degrees to 24 degrees. That gives us a 224ish terrestrial day V-year, a 1.92 V-day V-year, and approximately eight seasons per V-year, each being 56 days long.

On that planet, you get to go outside and enjoy the fresh air, but you want to know what season it is more than you want to know what month it is:

dark-winter, dark-fall, dark-summer, dark-spring

bright-winter, bright-fall, hell, bright-spring

(Venus rotates backwards, that's why the seasons are all funny.)

But when you want to know when the next shipment of Earth whisky is coming, you ask a computer.

Mission elapsed time just complicates things. Now that we have enough memory that we don't need to worry so much about overflow, we just use the Unix epoch even onboard spacecraft.

Unix time is not really great for any scientific purpose; it defines each day to have exactly 86400 seconds. (So, eventually you have problems with leap seconds.)

UTC is better, because at least it is aware of leap seconds, but performing any calculation spanning a year's end involves consulting a database of leap seconds. Notably these aren't determined much in advance, so such calculations involving future dates will also involve leap-second errors.

TAI is best (for non-relativistic non-sidereal purposes), as it is not adjusted to account for leap seconds. You can calculate with it without trouble.

(All three of the above are based on the atomic SI second, so despite their differences, their seconds tick synchronously.)

In astronomical contexts there are good alternatives to the epoch (like TDB, mentioned in another comment). I interpreted the top-level question as relating to day-to-day measurements and representations of time, presumably for use by extraterrestrial humans, since the commenter asked in the context of handling time zones and units like weeks and months which are irrelevant in a scientific context.

UTC is not a great choice for a universal interplanetary time system, as it's designed to work on just one planet, for just one calendar system. It'll work fine while we're asking humans on Earth to oversee robots on the Mars, but will fall down pretty quickly once humans take permanent residence on celestial bodies that don't have Earth's rhythms.

Well, the general idea seems usable enough; X time units from a specific reference point. Conversion is then done to whatever local time-keeping system you might have.

Leap seconds are based on conditions here on Earth and wouldn't really be needed on Mars or Venus. They might have different peculiarities though, and they wouldn't be usable on Earth. In that situation, a single point of reference would be useful for conversions.

Right; "X time units from a specific reference point" is what TAI is. Taking Unix time and removing the notion of leap seconds is effectively a circumlocution for exactly that standard :)

"International Atomic Time" (TAI) is probably the logical choice. It's the same as UTC, but without leap seconds.

Maybe the "stardate" of the future will simply be Unix Time, but based on TAI.

Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky has a bit where a "programmer archaeologist" (a term I just love) notes that deep in the thousand year old code running the starship the time is still counted in seconds since about a megasecond after the first lunar landing.

Time dilation undoes hopes of making any measure work universally. (Unless you include a bunch of other things besides one number in the measure...) But for subjective time there's UT1 (UTC minus leap seconds).

Ultraepoch? Milliseconds since the Big Bang?

I was going to make a silly joke about roaming charges being astronomical, but with the round trip time being approximately 2.7 seconds I think you'd actually have just enough time to request vectors and do a location update... maybe you will be able to bring your own SIM and device.

Launch-pad Ninja 1: "Great launch, good job team."

Launch-pad Ninja 2: "Let me take a team selfie.... that's funny I had my phone here somewhere. Let me check Find My iPhone...... er, oops!"

Radiation environment on the moon is worse than in the LEO. Earth's magnetic field is not protecting in the Moon. It's unclear how much rad-hard they need if they don't use it for anything safety critical. Rad-hard 90nm SoC for 4G/LTE should be relatively straightforward. Or maybe they use redundancy and use already available few generation old chipsets.

Changes for thermal management and testing eats most of the budget.

it doesnt need to last long enough for the first permanent moon colony, just long enough to get the investors excited and bump the stock.

frankly i think a moon colony thats anything but underground is a laughably myopic idea. the delta T for the moon is pretty insane.

Maybe, but it will definitely push technology a few steps forward. Big possibility something useful will be found along the way, maybe even in not related field but still.

Delta T? Please explain. I'm familiar with DeltaV, but pretty much all the delta T usages I have seen refer to a time interval.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v

Delta T in this case is probably referring to the change between the minimum and maximum temperatures experienced on the surface of the moon. In other words, the delta between something getting really hot spending 14 days in direct sunlight with no convection to cool it down and then getting really cold spending 14 days in darkness.

Delta T (for temperature) can also refer to the delta in temperature across an object as well. One side is very hot and one side is very cold. Often used when describing problems of relative thermal expansion.

> In other words, the delta between something getting really hot spending 14 days in direct sunlight with no convection to cool it down and then getting really cold spending 14 days in darkness.

Hmm. Could a buffer (e.g. water) be used? Basically... radiate heat out of the buffer when it's cold and move heat from the device into the buffer when it's warm?

Water could work as a buffer, but so could a rock, and this circles back to GGP's original point.

Similar reasoning (with perhaps higher focus on radiation than ∆T) applies to Mars, and is probably one of the side reasons Musk started The Boring Company.

I'm sure they would need something rad-hard for the system to last any practical amount of time. My guess is that Nokia would likely subcontract some of the electronics to companies that have experience in making rad-hard versions of existing technologies like BAE Systems or 3d Plus.

Thermal management is definitely hard, but this would be pretty run-of-the-mill thermal management for most space companies. I know this still means expensive but it's not an extreme thermal challenge like the Parker Solar Probe (keep things normal temps in a REALLY hot environment) or JWST (keep a very large structure at a VERY cold temperature)

Couldn't they just bury the box containing the circuitry under a few feet of lunar soil?

Burying things is a lot harder than just dropping them in place. Normally you'd pour a concrete foundation for something like this, so you'd be doing some excavation work anyway, but on the moon there's no need for a foundation because there's no wind.

> no need for a foundation

Moonquakes do seem to occur, and although they're not as damaging as earthquakes I wonder if they're still something that engineers need to worry about.

The limited experience we have with digging on the moon suggests when you get past the initial few centimeters of dust, it is hard as a rock.

They could drop a payload of 3310's from orbit.

We don't want to break the moon in half now, c'mon.

Cool and all, but I'd settle for a cellular network in Wyoming.

I've been wanting to move to Wy, but I can't figure out what locations actually have decent internet. Looks like Casper has gigabit fiber? That's all I can tell so far.

In live in San Antonio and while you can get gigabit AT&T even Google Fiber (I can get either) many neighborhoods have 25-50 mbit max from AT&T so you get whatever your cable provider (Spectrum offers).

I was living in far south Austin last year, and I could only get ATT DSL (10M down, 4M up).

I'm in San Antonio as well and I've had gigabit fiber in both downtown (currently) and north side residences.

For a second there, I was like "when did the mattress company relocate to Wyoming..."

What do you consider decent? Gigabit only? You can get at least 60-100 Mbps in most towns, as long as you aren't out of town. Probably gigabit if you're willing to pay a lot. Spectrum is the main option in the big towns. Looks like you can get gigabit from them in the big towns for $110/month for the first 12 months. Not sure what it would go to after that.

If you live out of town, or in a really small town, you're gonna have tougher luck

When I was looking for property in WA and OR there was absolutely no way to get internet (even DSL was a big maybe) outside of towns.

You normally have to get wireless internet, as long as you are in range.

WA has some municipal fiber networks. In my county, you can get hooked up if you foot the bill to extend the network to your property and find a retail provider to service your account. There's an online map that shows where the fiber currently is, you'll save a bunch of money on fiber construction if you build near where it already is.

Depending on the area, you can't even get internet outside of full cities. I own a house that's a few miles outside of a small town in Oregon. When I moved up here from the bay area recently, I had to rent a second house in the nearest city 30 miles south because there is absolutely no terrestrial internet service even within the city limits of my ~700 person town.

100-200 mb/s is decent for me. I can multiplex multiple cable modems so not a problem. It would be great to get something at the edge of town that has a lot of land, but I might have to settle for DSL.

I don’t think that has anything to do with Nasa or Nokia?

It has to do with that the expense of setting up a cellular network is so expensive that it hasn't be done in large parts of the earth, much less another celestial body.

That's the business of network providers. To acquire the hardware, install them, and operate the service. That has nothing to do with Nasa or Nokia.

I don't know why there are areas in US that lack service providers. Maybe someone here can explain it - I presume the reason has to do with something US specific about the business rather the overall cost since lots of low GDP areas globally can have good cellular coverage.

I get 4G in Russia, on a mountain in a crevice that has a glacier and 4 goats.

Jokes aside, you'd be surprised how good network coverage is in some remote areas that seemingly have very little economic value.

It's not so much average earnings per person as average people per square mile. The network providers only want to invest where the return on that investment meets or exceeds some floor. Parts of the US are so sparsely populated the phone contracts for cellular would be huge to justify building the towers and backhauling the signals.

Somewhere, a person with the expertise to deploy cellular networks is working on this rather than WY.

Deploying a cellular network is a simple exercise in capital expenditure and operating it as a service run of the mill business.

It's not about technical expertise but of business. Why the business does not provide the service? I have no idea.

So lets close all catering in casinos, bars and all of Vegas untill every child in Africa is fed.

And all distilleries and breweries, since they waste perfectly good produce to brew alcohol, and just increase our healthcare costs

And gold courses.

Contrary to what British newspapers might like you to believe, NASA is always capitalized.

There are so many things named with stupidly inconsistent capitalization that we should all stop caring and just capitalize the first letter like any other proper noun. I often have to google a product or company name to find out the correct capitalization, which is often hard to find because the stylized logo doesn't even use it.

Does this mean the ITU is going to assign the moon a country code? I vote for +6666 (MOON).

Who decides what parts of the moon get what area codes?

Imagine how long it will take to get Orange to instal a landline in a crater!

The conspiracy theorists would go rabid.

I like it, but +66 is Thailand already.

It would probably get one of the available +87x or +88x codes. If they aren't just going to issue numbers from the home country.

I like it, but +66 is Thailand already.

Maybe Thailand could be reassigned. Like when Mexico dropped out of +1 to become +52.

Or maybe instead of +, we dial & to get off-planet.

You're suggesting an entire country of millions of people change their phone numbers because America decides that it wants to create a new international area code which happens to match the word "moon" in English?

Seems like a completely sensible option to me. What objections do you have?

If anything, it should be luna and not moon.

You're suggesting an entire country of millions of people change their phone numbers

Yes. It's been done before. And considering the available space, eventually the moon could have more people on it than Thailand.

because America

What makes you think that only one country will use phones on the moon?

"Luna" 5862 might be a better option if there isn't already a 58?

58 is Venezuela.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_country_calling_codes

6666 is meaningless for people who speak French (that would be lune, 5863), or German (Mond, 6663), or Spanish (Luna, 5862). The rest of the world would be quite happy with say +83 for interplanetary codes.

Perhaps America should change its country code from +1 to say +889, and open up +100 through +199 for others.

There should definitely be a prefix for celestial bodies added. Probably a lot of work though so we’ll just give each body a country code.

What about +CCC?

Suggestion: doubling the international call prefix to 'dial out' of Earth's networks and followed by a new code to dial into the Moon's.

There is no single "the" international call prefix for the whole world, and quite a lot of telephony operates with E.164 format internally.

Why would it be 6666 and not 5862?

I vote for 20010.

Isn't the + a shorthand for the international part of the code, which changes per country. My country (oz) it's 0011 (and faxes were/are 0015). So you don't need to create new country codes or boot countries into new prefixes, but just supply a new interplanetary prefix.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_call_p...

It's crazy to think only three space programs have soft landed on the moon. And since the first in 1966, there have only been about 2 dozen soft landings on the moon.

We tend to forget it's really hard to do.

I think the full list is

Luna 9, 13, 16, 17, 20, 21, 24 (1966-1976)

Surveyor 1, 3, 5, 6, 7 (1966-68)

Apollo 11,12,14,15,16,17 (1969-72)

Chang'e 3 and 4 (2013 + 2019)

The gaps in numbers are telling.

And even Apollo which was by far and away the most successful had three astronauts killed on the launchpad and Apollo 13's lunar landing scrubbed.

The later Apollo missions weren't very popular with the public and were a potential political disaster for the president. Many people felt they were an enormous waste of money.

James Burke made a really great documentary mini-series in ~1980 where he interviewed a lot of the people involved in the Apollo missions. You can still find them on YouTube.

Dumb question: What gives NASA the authority to build anything on the moon?

By being in a country that is a nuclear armed superpower with veto rights on the UN Security Council. Stuff like outer space treaty only matters when the bigger players are willing enforce it.

As far as I know the outer space treaty only prevents the construction of military installations, but civilian construction would be perfectly lawful under the treaty.

it's fairly limited. only WMDs are explicitly prohibited. other weapons (eg, anti-satellite) are a grey area AFAIK. recon satellites and facilities for military research are fair game.

Military installations will go out the window as soon as a military has something useful to do up there. Right now it is a interesting idea but not actually practicable. When a war starts military leaders get their way if it means winning, which means the treaty will be broke if there is something useful to do in space.

This is why chemical weapons treaties are signed and obeyed, while land mind treaties are not: the military of powerful countries doesn't seem chemical weapons as something they want, while landmines are useful in some situations. (If your country has signed a land mind treaty it is probably because they can count on an allied country that hasn't to place land mines. If your country hasn't signed a chemical weapons treaty it is because your military isn't very good by modern standards and so you can accept the downsides)

Or just being on the moon and building civilian infrastructure and not military infrastructure... other countries are entirely free to do the same...

A better question: are there any agreements forbidding anyone from constructing something on the moon?

Militarization of anything in space is specifically forbidden by the international treaty.

Building anything else is perfectly fine, as long as you don't claim ownership over a portion of a celestial object.

Might makes right.

My Google Fu only turned up the Outer Space Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

But I wouldn't be surprised if this is new territory for law and sovereignty on the moon, and will be a bit controversial.

There are rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

Basically anything goes as long as it's not for military purposes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

Article IV says: "The use of any equipment or facility necessary for peaceful exploration of the moon and other celestial bodies shall also not be prohibited."

All I want to do is reply with a hashtag, but I do understand there's some concerns of militarization of the moon/space.

Yet, people and country who get there first usually get to name it, but then that's a touch of concern in todays times of #colonization yet it has succeeded and failed when you look at USA, Spain, UK, France....

Meanwhile, would any viable competitors in terms of China and Russia honor and think about this as if "NASA" has authority vs "they were first too?"

So, #America!

In the grand scheme of things, USA has been much much fair in terms of diplomacy across the world, from shipping channels and helping peace (through war, unfortunately, sometimes) vs China or Russia.

So it's a good question, really good.

The Outer Space Treaty grants these activities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

Until a global org based on science and not d@#$ length emerges to take the species forward with breakneck speed as far as space based research is concerned- everyone can do whatever they like. Treaties yada yada no one is going to check an American satellite if it has military applications or not. So we'll just have to wait till the next war to find out that honesty is, in fact, a four letter word.

As usual, The Onion's take on this is fantastic: https://www.theonion.com/nasa-builds-4g-tower-on-moon-tastef...

I assumed it would be about the moon aliens protesting about the tower going in their backyard. NIMMBY: not in my moon back yard :)

Well done. That reminds me of one of those cell phone towers disguised as a tree I drive by quite often. It is in the middle of a very large, very flat plain. I don't think there is another tree within 10 miles of it.

I see cell towers in the desert that are "disguised" to look like pine trees in places where pine trees haven't grown in 10,000 years.

https://twitter.com/Reaperducer/status/1153046208442540032

Here's a Google Maps image of one of these "trees" from a distance. This one is in the UK.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.8765015,-2.0253306,3a,75y,...

That's so strange. I don't see why they couldn't just pick a color that matched the other trees around it even slightly. The out-of-place ones I see that are among other trees are usually out-of-place because they are just so much taller, not a completely different color.

Well it's going to look more obvious at different times of the year. Especially in the fall and winter.

In winter it'll be covered in snow? Should blend in better then

That's probably not going to be the case for most of the time in Southern England.

Here’s another one from my city in a semi desert area in northern Mexico (take a look at the kind of trees that grow around here for comparison).

https://goo.gl/maps/J76RJAaMQcaCdoWD6

Should've used the cactus version https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/y0nsj/how_to_hide_a_c...

I've never noticed those before, thanks! I've just seen the pine tree and palm tree ones. Always fun when they install the wrong one in a situation.

We moved to AZ from TN last year. TN doesn't really bother with hiding the towers whereas AZ sometimes camouflages them; especially in the richer areas such as Scottsdale.

My wife told me about some weird tree she saw which turned out to be a cell tower. I take great joy in reminding her periodically about that.

Actually, my parents have a home in Townsend near the Smokeys and a huge tower stuck up from one of the highest peaks for years, making evveryone mad.

So they turned it into a "tree" and it looks even more ridiculous.

But the coverage in the area is much improved.

Yeah, I think the tree camouflage does just make it worse sometimes and they should just stick with painting it a muted grey/blue so it kind of blends with the sky.

Or let local artists "adopt" and paint the cell towers. In my town, artists paint unique murals and designs on the ugly public utility boxes on street corners. Though cell towers don't have many flat surfaces to paint..

Theme parks paint the exteriors of buildings housing large rides and theaters in "go-away gray" or "go-away green" so that the public generally doesn't notice them.

All terrestrial base stations (1) require GPS signal for time synchronization. Most of them can run for 4 hours - 24 hours without GPS, but that's it, after that holdover period it's dead.

There is no GPS signal on the moon. That's a problem.

(1) except micro base stations

They could use their own timing source, though? I recall back in the day being able to pull timing source off a circuit.

Yes, that's the clock holdover circuit, usually built using a OCXO or double OCXO or rubidium clock. It's good for 4 to 24 hours. Example:

[0] https://www.rakon.com/19-rak-product/rak-product-ocxo

It's a problem being worked on, but it should be possible to use the existing GPS satellites on Moon. Also, given it is just being used as a time source and not for navigation, it should be possible to make a moon-based time signal with less hardware units?

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-eyes-gps-at-t...

Low lunar orbits are unfortunately too unstable.

There's only like an extra 25 dB of path loss to the moon than Earth since GPS satellites are at orbits of 20,000 km. Of course the GPS antennas are probably oriented facing the Earth, but you'd still see GPS satellies on the far side (with a bit more path loss). Since GPS has a 43 dB processing gain from the modulation scheme, and thermal noise levels on the moon are similar to Earth (I think?), that means you need -150 dBm or so at the receiver. I believe newer GPS satellites have an EIRP of 50 dBm or so, so receiving GPS signals on the moon might work without even using a high gain antenna. Use of a high gain antenna would probably completely compensate for the increased path loss to the moon.

What exactly requires time sync? I think it's mainly stuff like inter-cell handover, MIMO with multiple cells streaming downlink to a single phone, these kind of things. It should work as long as the base stations are synced well -- no matter what reference. Or they just drop the features that require good sync.

[Edit: maybe TDD mode? but they could settle for FDD...]

There are indications that signals from the US GPS constellation and other GNSS constellations can be received on at least part of the moon; coverage gaps could be closed with just a couple of satellites near the moon.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/satellites/can...

Does the GPS protocol or another protocol already handle satellites in arbitrary and arbitrarily large orbits?

TDD base stations require synchronization (around 3µs) to avoid interfering with each others, but this does of course not apply if there is only one BS or if there is any other way to sync them (e.g. SyncE + IEEE-1588v2, G.8275...). See https://docdb.cept.org/download/220ac21f-b44b/ECCREP216.PDF

As far as I know 3GPP2 cdma2000/EV-DO also need GPS because the codes are synchronous (although I am not familiar with those technologies).

Apart from that, 3GPP FDD base stations only require a stable frequency reference, not a time reference (LTE/WCDMA base stations are not connected to GPS !)

As there will be only one cellular network, inference coordination and timing is relatively easy to solve. You just use PTP. No need to GPSS Everywhere.

There’s lots of comments about roaming charges and dialling codes here but despite using 4G/LTE I’m assuming this is a closed network - you won’t be able to call an astronaut without going through NASA.

Initially.

For reaching astronauts, we'll have to wait for them to put a ham repeater on the Moon.

If there is intelligent life somewhere out there, when they travel to space, I wonder if they also insist on operating technology that is at least one generation back, for the reason of "proven reliability"? I'd say probably yes. If we ever get a visit from them, that "shmux semiconductor" will be the old model...

its so they can have some planned obsolescence

Lots of profit in those service contracts.

5G base station/terminal power usage isn't very optimized yet.

"Greetings humans! Our vessel has arrived to destroy your planet! Please wait a few months though because this is the old model that takes a while to charge up, sorry about that..."

https://youtu.be/2XUnMiERBj4

Given the nature of space travel, it will likely be a very old model indeed. Unless they have FTL!

If they don't have FTL (including no time effects) they will never come. Space is too large to go anywhere useful. The nearest start is ~4 light years away, at 1/10th the speed of light (vastly faster than we know how to go) it is 40 years to get here! We have done a lot of searching for life and haven't found it, the closer the planet is, the more likely we are to find it, thus I think it is safe to concluded there is no life within 20 light years or so. At 20 light years communication via radio is hard to establish just because turn around time for questions won't be answered in a lifetime. (It will be interesting learning about their Roman Empire history, but if they explain science and there is even one thing we don't get the person who sends the what do you mean question is retired/dead before the answer arrives - unless a few years latter we figure it out anyway.

Take the civilization 20 light years away, either they left before they even know we existed (we didn't have any emissions that indicated intelligence, though they might be able to detect life), and so they are not equipped to deal with us. If they want to take over - they didn't break enough weapons because they didn't expect to need them.

Even if life is common in the universe, it isn't common in any area where an intelligent civilization can expect to actually reach without FTL.

Interesting! I did the calculation and it's actually worse than that...

Alpha Centauri is just 4.37ly away. With an acceleration of 0.00227g, mass of 1t, and max velocity of 0.1C (10% of C), it will take 86.33 years to reach Alpha Centauri for those on the spaceship, assuming you also want to stop at the destination. (Calculator: https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/space-travel#space-tr...)

It's interesting to see you speculate that it would be a culture that prioritizes reliability. I could also imagine that it is more like the Vikings or Polynesians where some fishermen pushed technology further than before and ended up somewhere new. That kind of "bravery" or experimentation has sometimes played of in past circumstances much better than some kind of architected reliability / safety focused approach.

It has to safety oriented. Space is death. Advanced civilizations can probably harness that danger like we do fire and electricity but we still f#@$ it up burning buildings and cars. Thus we spend time and energy with fire safety. Space is a different ballgame

I still think the parent has a insightful comment. It's interesting to compare the hybrid between deep care and deep recklessness of Belters in various scifi (e.g. The Expanse) vs. historical oceanic explorers on Earth. Setting off across the ocean in little more than a canoe doesn't seem particularly safety oriented, and maybe there is a civilization that evolves a similar approach to space. That could be as simple as "spray and pray," or more deceptively sophisticated like Polynesian navigation.

Anyone noticed his way of speaking? Journalist type, without point at the end of their sentence, but commas.

We have the same phenomenon in France: https://www.koreus.com/video/journaliste-voix-off.html

I would love to see some mock-ups of orbital patterns for a moon based starlink-like network. How does the relative lack of an atmosphere affect things? How large of a constellation do you need when the orbital body is 1/4 the size of earth?

I would not be very hard to do. The principle problem is just that the moons gravity is unstable so low flying objects would need quite a bit of fuel to stay in the correctorbit.

However, since the distance to earth anyway is the limiting factor you don't need low flying sats at all. A handful of sats could do a pretty good job with global coverage.

> the moons gravity is unstable

How so? Even if, say, its mass were very unevenly distributed, there should still be a center of gravity around which to orbit, yeah?

You can read about this here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)...

It would be way, way easier on the Moon because there's no atmosphere to attenuate signal. You would need fewer satellites and lower power. Since you could build enormously tall towers in 1/6 gravity satellites might not even be economical compared with a few big towers.

I see nice things like this and I wonder if they could’ve spent that money on actually making better service and proving more coverage in hard to reach areas.

Not to be facetious or anything, but I'd argue the moon is a hard-to-reach area with a distinct lack of coverage.

Now, I don't think it's going to impact a significant number of end-users, so probably not great from that perspective.

Who? Nasa? Nasa is not in telco business the last time I lopked. And it’s not certainly Nokia’s business to provide cellular coverage. They provide the hardware but the actual coverage is implemented by network providers installing the hardware after purchase.

I wonder how bad the roaming charges will be for the astronauts if they accidentally use their earthly iPhone SIM with the Moon network.

We'll have a cell network on the moon and still lack basic broadband access to many rural areas.

> We'll have a cell network on the moon and still lack basic broadband access to many rural areas.

Probably, but then the share of the population on the moon is nondecreasing, unlike that in the rural areas at issue.

In absolute numbers, the rural population in the US has remained fairly steady. It's only decreased as a % of the total population: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/...

What will be the country code for the moon? I would guess that the network must have one even though it would not be directly connected to the cellular networks on earth.

Can the astronauts actually phone home using some kind of link from their network to ours?

For nostalgia they should have towers capable of their old phones.

Remember this nokia ringtone? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk4KK-gh0FM

The 4G/5G question seems absurd the way it was posed as a matter of mere reliability. Don't we care more about range and the odd characteristics of the moon and the vacuum of space?

4G hardware is mature and fairly reliable at this point. There's probably 5G base equipment that would work too, but the client hardware is probably also an issue.

4G speeds ought to be more than enough for a lot of traffic -- it's not that the astrounauts will be streaming movies off Netflix when they're outside or anything.

Is the idea here that by building a 4G/LTE network they can use pre-existing hardware (or at least pre-existing technology) on future missions at much lower cost than the alternative?

Wonder if ads with eat chunk of astronauts broadband there as well... matter of time. Ad division in YouTube must be hysterical over a new market appearing.

Am I the only one wondering what the point of this is?

Imagine you need robots and machines to work remotely on the moon without a human inside a cabin controlling things, without a line of sight and in a low power, low footprint form factor

Now you have 2 options:

1. Use off the shelf Quectel and Qualcomm devices and off the shelf existing embedded hardware. Then test and develop using common terrestrial networks and harden it for radiation. Pack and deploy.

2. Use something else that requires custom design, exotic hardware, untested interoperability, custom built terrestrial towers etc...

I'm going to vote on option 1 for saving time and money...

Yeah, 1) seems to be much more cost effective. Building the equipment on off-the-shelf hardware and software could potentially reduce the costs quite a lot, and there's no reason all the stuff around the lander shouldn't be able to communicate over standard TCP/IP instead of some proprietary protocol.

Thanks for the ideas, they seem reasonable.

In passing, I'd note that I don't think cell technology would work without LoS; also, there's no atmosphere to reflect off of.

I guess if they're just thinking of some comm system for the moon, it might as well be 4G. (I guess? I'm not qualified to answer this.)

When can we send Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Elon Musk there so that they can chat with each other?

Microsoft and allies seem to be winning "hearts and minds" in the DoD and related sectors of US.

https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsoft-nokia-reunite-new-al...

Uh oh... Those 4G signals are what will wake up the black obelisk buried on the moon.

Waiting for the Huawei 7G network on Mars.

> remote control of lunar rovers and other robotic devices

And what about the known vulnerabilities of LTE/4G?

If there are hackers on the moon you have a lot of other issues.

What about the secret nazi base on the far side of the moon [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sky

At least we won't have to hear that ring tone, because there's no air on the moon.

3310 already moon-grade in terms of solidity. 20 years of field tests.

Lets see if this survives the election (it probably should)

"Something went wrong."

oh dear.. Send an engineer I guess :)

That’s funny. Can’t even get LTE in the countryside but sure, build a network on the moon

Well, the same argument can be made for lots of things. As in, why not provide poor kids with better school lunches when we've spent $100B to build the space station?

The real answer is to take from the military budget ($700B/yr) instead of from the civilian space budget.

The moon is going to have a dense fleet of Wireless IoT I guess.

This reminds me of when the Bush administration gave the contract for building a cell network in Iraq to Worldcom. And Worldcom went bankrupt. Clearly, they were not in the right position to fullfill the contract, but they were in the right position to bribe their way into the contract.

In fairness to the Bush administration (not words I often use), WorldCom went bankrupt due to a massive accounting fraud that was probably largely unrelated to their technical capability to fulfill the contract.

Nokia is a highly profitable company. I’m not seeing the comparison.

Their loss making division was the phones division which was sold off a while ago.

Well, I wouldn't say highly profitable. Unless I am reading incorrectly they haven't been making much of profit lately. Maybe the good parts make a hefty profit but alas, as a whole it has been a pretty sad sight to see.

The top management is out, we'll see next year how it changes the books.

Nokia have an unrivalled technology and product platform, they’ve shipped millions of 4G/LTE base stations over the past decade. What makes you say they are not in a position to fulfil the contract?

Presumably they’ll get a lift to the moon from NASA

This isn't the part of Nokia you're thinking of, which made handsets. That business was sold to Microsoft in a very dubious deal, and Microsoft promptly ran it into the ground.

Nokia is one of the three main players in the cell phone infrastructure market. The others are Ericsson and Huawei. There are a couple of smaller players too like Samsung and ZTE.

Nokia seems like a very reasonable choice for this contract. The Chinese players were presumably out for (mostly) political reasons. So this was probably a 2 way race with Ericsson.

edited: fix typo.

And so the legendary indestructibility of Nokia's phones shall be put to the test once more.

The very first or two digits of any phone number on Earth are the country calling codes. We should add extra digits for a planetary calling code.

Almost all of them are taken but 999 is still free!

999 is the emergency number in the UK and a few other places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999_(emergency_telephone_numbe...

That's far from ideal, but country codes in phone numbers are also always prefixed, so a phone number in country code 999 would never start with that number, it would either be +999 [something] on a smartphone for example, or the old school equivalent 00 999 [something].

Imagine accidentally calling an astronaut. Or doing FaceTime/Zoom with them on the moon. It would be interesting.

"I have great news about the extended warranty on your moon buggy!"

"According to our records you've been involved in an accident..."

(Maybe that's UK only)

And so, in 2050, the Nokia Shield Initiative was launched. 500 (american) football field sized Nokia 3310's were put into orbit to protect the earth.

Most country codes are 3 digits. There are a few 2 digits, and I think parts the old USSR and the North American Dialing region are the only 1-digit codes.

Nokia isn't doing the phones, that's maybe why you're getting the downvotes;

On the second point, however, I kinda agree. People are mentioning some of the +8XX international codes but we should really go hierarchical. A separate higher level code for Earth, for Moon, other planetary bodies; then eventually higher level codes for solar systems, etc.

I really doubt they'll even be doing phone numbers, though.

There is no point in doing solar systems - the turn around time to the next star is ~ 8 years. Nobody will make a phone call with that sort of latency. It will be email (or videos) if anything at all.

Even in this solar system only Venus and Mars can you even think about a phone call from earth - and then only for a few days when the orbits align closely. The rest of the time the latency will be too bad. Even when it is possible you will need special training to deal with the latency - it will be more of a monologue not a conversation, with pre-planed handoff times for the other side to state their bit.

The moon will be possible, but most people who try it will find it annoying enough that they will avoid it. If grandma didn't go with you that it will be the only way to talk to the grandkids so it will be done, but if the moon ever becomes self-sustaining expect that there isn't a lot of communication back and forth.

There is a reason satellite never took off for long distance calls - it works but people hated it because the other party didn't respond fast enough. Geosynchronous orbit is only used for calls where there isn't an underseas cable (I don't know if any such satellites are even left in orbit).

I know, I was being facetious. It's possible they won't even do phone numbers for the moon - LTE gives a data connection, and you use whatever protocol on top, VoIP, Signal, Whatsapp, Facetime, whatever.

With Blackjack. And Hookers. In fact forget the cellular network!

Watch Elon implement this as an OTA update to Starlink without breaking a sweat, while NASA burns billions just to prototype a model...

Are reddit's Elon worshippers leaking to HN?

You're confusing respect with worship. And he was clearly joking.

Indeed I was :) /whoosh

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