As you point your phone’s camera to the heavens, snapping sometotally real shots of the moon, do you ever think about what life might be like up there? When we finally do inhabit the moon, Nokia is making sure you’ll be able to get a signal. DuringMobile World Congressin Barcelona in March, Nokia principal engineer Luis Maestro Ruiz De Temino told reporters that the company plans to launch a 4G network on the surface of the moon later this year.
According to a CNBC report, Nokia’s 4G network will travel to the moon aboard a SpaceX rocket and will make its home on the Shackleton crater, on the southern limb of the moon. The antenna-equipped base station with integrated EPC functionalities will be housed in a Nova-C lunar lander and will get its power from a solar-powered rover.
The rover and the base station will communicate with each other over LTE and will enable astronauts to stream real-time video back to mission control as well as communicate with each other.
Nokia says that the equipment it’s using for the projecthas been customized to handle the environmental stresses of space— specifically, vibration, shock, and acceleration during takeoff and landing, as well as things like temperature and radiation while it’s on the moon’s surface. The device’s size, weight, and power consumption were all heavily considered during engineering.
The hope with the mission is for Nokia to be able to learn more about radio propagation on the moon. On earth, for instance, there are trees, buildings, and other structures that come into play when thinking about how our devices communicate with each other. The moon doesn’t have any of those, but it does have mountains and craters that the network will need to be able to operate around, instead.
While we don’t yet have a specific date for the launch, all of it is paving the way for LTE to be present in space. Who knows, maybe one day E.T. literally will be able to phone home.
