{"id":1216529,"date":"2025-02-18T11:50:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-18T16:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1216529"},"modified":"2025-02-18T11:50:00","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T16:50:00","slug":"nokia-is-putting-the-first-cellular-network-on-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1216529","title":{"rendered":"Nokia is Putting the First Cellular Network On the Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"
An anonymous reader shares a report: Later this month, Intuitive Machines, the private company behind the first commercial lander that touched down on the moon, will launch a second lunar mission from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The plan is to deploy a lander, a rover, and hopper to explore a site near the lunar south pole that could harbor water ice, and to put a communications satellite on lunar orbit. But the mission will also bring something that’s never been installed on the moon or anywhere else in space before — a fully functional 4G cellular network. <\/p>\n

Point-to-point radio communications, which need a clear line of sight between transmitting and receiving antennas, have always been a backbone of both surface communications and the link back to Earth, starting with the Apollo program. Using point-to-point radio in space wasn’t much of an issue in the past because there never have been that many points to connect. Usually, it was just a single spacecraft, a lander, or a rover talking to Earth. And they didn’t need to send much data either. “They were based on [ultra high frequency] or [very high frequency] technologies connecting a small number of devices with relatively low data throughput,” says Thierry Klein, president of Nokia Bell Labs Solutions Research, which was contracted by NASA to design a cellular network for the moon back in 2020.<\/p>\n

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