Thierry Klein of the Nokia Bell Lab says he is what some might call a “space geek” and, although he never traveled into orbit, a planned mission with NASA to establish an LTE network on the Moon l ‘gets a little closer.
4G LTE networks are well established here on Earth, but what does it take to translate cellular technology for applications to the lunar surface?
FierceWireless spoke with Klein, head of Nokia Bell Labs’ Business Research and Industrial Automation Laboratory, to find out.
To begin with, a lot of testing is needed. When a cell site crashes or something doesn’t work properly on a terrestrial network, queue up for the technician or engineering crew to go fix it. On the Moon, however, the aid is not exactly a truck shot (not even a rocket).
“You can never try enough,” Klein told Fierce.
Then it is fortunate that the last mission with NASA is not Nokia’s first foray into lunar LTE. The Finnish seller was the technology partner of a previous privately funded project in 2018 with Vodafone and Audi to put LTE on the moon.
This mission never flew, but Nokia already built an LTE system for this purpose. He set up settings exactly like the ones that would be used on the Moon, to test performance, range, performance and more. According to Klein, approximately 25 tests were performed on environmental cameras to detect extreme conditions and stress factors such as shocks, vibrations, vacuum, thermal and radiation.
The new project is part of NASA’s Artemis program and Nokia won a $ 14.1 million prize for its winning “Tipping Point” proposal that the space program requested to help develop technologies with the goal of sustainable human operations on the lunar surface in 2030.
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Now, however, Nokia has to integrate the team with a lunar lander developed by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, and it has yet to be developed and tested to align with the mission-specific requirements, which, all and being similar, it is also unique.
“That’s really the focus for us this year,” Klein said of development, integration and testing.
The planned launch date is 2022. The location has not been completed for the mission, but it is aimed at the South Pole of the Moon to run for several light weeks of lunar day.
Beam me up
What does an LTE lunar network look like? Nokia’s plans begin with equipment that has been optimized and hardened to withstand extreme conditions, from takeoff to landing, to intense radiation once on the surface.
According to Klein, all elements of the commercial network are reduced to what basically becomes an entire LTE network in one box.
“You have your radio, your baseband, your core, and all your functionality built into a single compact unit that will be deployed in the lunar lander,” Klein said, along with the antennas. He compared it to a small cell with an integrated evolved packet core (ePC).
The equivalent of user equipment (EU) is attached to the rover, also with its own antennas, to establish the link from the lunar lander to the EU of the rover.
The antennas do not drop from a typical 100-foot tower height, but are placed between 3 and 5 feet above the ground. This has a big impact on the range, Klein noted, and the project is geared towards two scenarios.
One is short-range, sending the rover 300 to 400 meters away from the lander and a second longer-range target, where the rover would be 5 kilometers from the lander. It’s something Nokia believes can be achieved based on experimental validation with its equipment, power levels and height, Klein said.
Along with the LTE system, Nokia provides operations maintenance software that reconnects to mission control to manage the management, maintenance, configurations, and remote control of the network itself.
The Moon presents its own terrain challenges, but the advantage is that you won’t find skyscrapers like you would in the center of a major metropolitan area.
“The lunar landscape is very different, there are no obstructions, no buildings, no trees,” Klein said. “At the same time, you have valleys, craters and pebbles, but it’s generally open terrain, so it helps your autonomy.” And electromagnetic waves propagate even without an atmosphere.
Are you looking for a signal?
The goal of the mission is not for astronauts to make video chats or send GIFs, at least not initially.
Space communications typically use proprietary technologies developed by defense or aerospace companies, Klein said, with Wi-Fi on the International Space Station. And this is different from direct communications from space to Earth using satellites or other technologies.
Cellular technologies are not used in space, Klein said. Therefore, it would be the first time that the mobile comes into play for lunar surface or space communications.
As an unmanned space mission, the main goal is to establish surface communications on the Moon, with data links between the lunar lander and a custom-built equivalent of an end-user device attached to the rover. For this project, it is mainly about data transmission and HD video from the rover to the lander, as well as the remote control of the rover.
Nokia hopes to offer advanced features such as performance, latency, reliability and other 4G features. In the future, access to information, machine, voice, and video interactions are part of the image as astronauts enter lunar, Martian, or other space missions.
“In the future there will be manned missions so astronauts can talk to each other, machines, sensors, devices and really have all their videos, voice apps, biometrics apps, telemetry, data collection from sensors they can collect, as well as any automation and robotic control, ”Klein said.
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As NASA seeks to establish a sustainable presence on the Moon, a human element also comes into play and motivates Nokia.
“We use cellular technologies every day and astronauts in their personal lives also use those capabilities,” Klein said, and Nokia believes they should also have access to these while performing missions, not just here on Earth.
Tests, tests
There are four key areas that Nokia needs to prepare to ensure that your computer and software are robust enough.
The first is to make sure it survives the launch and landing, Klein explained, with mechanical stressors such as shock, vibration and acceleration.
The second is to be able to operate in extreme environments, with temperature ranges, operate in vacuum and radiation.
Radiation is one of the most unique challenges in space, according to Klein.
The impact of Radiation on software is that it could turn bits in the code “and suddenly your code no longer works.” The question is how to protect yourself and recover from it. And not all hardware components are equally susceptible to radiation, he explained.
The third is reliability, as mentioned above.
“There is no way to send someone to change equipment here, so it has to be absolutely reliable, it has to have redundancy, both in hardware and software, and it has to be able to configure, restart and remotely manage your computer, ”Klein said.
And the fourth is about size, weight and power. This means integrating as much as possible into a single form factor, according to Klein, and optimizing power consumption so that dimensions and functions are reduced to just what is needed. But it is a balance with the third point of reliability and robustness, he noted, with double redundancy in the elements of the hardware.
While radiation may be unique to space, small footprints, energy consumption, and weight are also important for a terrestrial network.
“Not only is it exciting to put it in space, but we see that we would drive the technology and development capabilities that will also have applicability in terrestrial environments,” Klein said. “By doing so, we will absolutely learn and optimize the networks and then reclaim these lessons on the ground and apply them to our commercial product for business industrial applications.”
Imagine oil rigs or mines, where remote operation is also applied along with small form factors.
The team expects a successful mission, both to validate performance and to provide models so that they can design and size future applications potentially on a larger scale in space.
As for Klein and the team, he said the most exciting aspect is that the technologies that Nokia Bell labs have built are pushing them beyond current limits.
“It’s just a very exciting opportunity to bring something as far as I can, maybe literally,” Klein said.