WiFi on the moon: SFU helping develop wireless network for next NASA moonshot

How many bars of cellphone reception can an astronaut get on the moon?

That may sound like the setup to a joke or a riddle, but it’s essentially the question a team of scientists at Simon Fraser University and the University of Colorado are working on.

The project is one of many undergoing study today to make way for NASA‘s human-crewed return to the moon in 2024 with the first mission in the forthcoming Artemis Project.

“The crew member could take their phone and call home. They could text their kids from the lunar surface from that phone,” Kevin Gifford, a project researcher with the University of Colorado, told Global News.

3:35 Canada to join moon mission in 2023

A key logistical issue for those missions will be stable LTE, 4G and WiFi connections that function in space.

Nokia Bell Labs has been tasked with creating an LTE cellular test network on the moon by 2022 to prove the technology needed for the human missions.

Before that can happen, the technology has to be proven to work between different space agencies and their equipment.

SFU’s PolyLAB for Advanced Collaborative Networking is now doing some of that work at its Exploration Wireless Communications testbed at Vancouver’s Harbour Centre, in collaboration with the Canadian Space Agency and Nokia.

“(This is) what will allow us to build the ladder of technology standards needed to get cellular networks off Earth and into the solar system,” PolyLAB director Stephen Braham said in a statement.

“Before space agencies can adopt these technologies, we need to prove we can operate between multiple vendors and different agencies.”

On Wednesday, officials announced that when NASA returns to the moon in 2023 for a crewed lunar flyby, a Canadian astronaut will be aboard.

That agreement will make Canada the second country in history to have an astronaut travel into deep space and fly around the moon.