Constellations spoke with Jono Luk, Vice President of Product Management at Webex at Cisco about the transformative role of video in space exploration and overcoming the challenges to make it happen.

With the upcoming launch of NASA's Artemis I mission to the moon, the renewed focus is to get humans back into space, onto the moon and beyond. Which is why deep space communication is becoming such a timely topic.

Luk and Webex are part of a three-company effort, the Callisto project, to see that video communication in deep space becomes a reality to support humans in space – no small feat when separated by a quarter million miles.

Where humans go, communications must follow

What typically might be a one to two day round trip to get information back and forth could happen near instantaneously with video collaboration.

“We're demonstrating that we can reduce the time to outcomes with, in our case, video. Instead of taking a photo, sending it to earth, having a decision made, them sending the result, which could take hours because of the process, we hope to make that happen in near real time,” Luk added.

With video transforming life on earth, the value proposition in space is expected to do even more. “It’s not only to see people, but also to see things,” Luk said. “As we do science exploration and experiments, we want to be able to see it as it happens so scientists on earth can suggest the next idea, ‘Do this, rotate that,’ to take experiments further.”

With the Artemis I program, the Callisto project will be the first test of video collaboration technology off planet.

While the initial Artemis I mission is unmanned, future stages will have astronauts returning to the lunar surface by 2024, paving the way for a long-term lunar presence and serving as a steppingstone on the way to Mars.

Can you hear me now?

But engaging in visual collaboration with a spacecraft more than 240,000 miles away presents significant challenges that requires expertise, from networking and compression to security encryption and more.

Callisto is actually a partnership of Lockheed Martin, Amazon Alexa, and Webex by Cisco, with the three companies collaborating on the solution.

Amazon Alexa is providing voice capability. Instead of navigating a panel and scrolling through hundreds of data points to find the rotational velocity of a component or the temperature of a module, astronauts will use voice to get that information quickly and freeing up their hands to get more done.

Webex is providing the video capability that connects the humans, from astronauts in the capsule on one end to the engineers at mission control, scientists in the lab, or students in the classroom on the other.

“Callisto is bringing what we think of as everyday technologies on earth to make deep space exploration that much better.”

Except the medium over which the communications must happen is hardly everyday.

Not one challenge, but many

On earth, video calls take place over thick fiberoptic cable sheathed to protect the signals. In space, Luk joked, there aren't a million miles of cable unspooling behind the capsule. Instead, video is happening over radio waves over NASA’s deep space network. Large satellite dishes, some 70 meters, are firing off signals into the vacuum of space, where anything can disrupt them, setting up the potential for data corruption and data loss. “That is the equivalent of our internet backbone, if you will,” said Luk alluding to the challenging environment.

“Not since the days of dial-up modems have we had to deal with losing a signal or connection to noise. In the last 10, 15 years, that's not a thing,” Luk said, “But the further you are from earth, 100,000, 200,000, a million miles away, there's much more distance for these potential problems.“

It then takes time for those signals to travel distance. Even at the speed of light, 250,000 miles introduces lag or latency that humans on earth otherwise would consider a dropped connection.

“Did you hear me? Did I come through? Did I cut out?" We are normalized to this sub-second latency,” Luk pointed out. “Here, we're talking seconds, or eventually minutes. The way we compute, account, and sync up the video and the audio signal is just fundamentally different because of those variables,” he added.

Another challenge is achieving better rates of compression. Luk used the analogy of trying to take 2022 high-definition video and cramming it over the equivalent of 2004 internet speed back in the days of the modem.

“We're taking one or two megabit per second video and trying to make that work in 100, 120 kilobit a second,” he explained, referring to the portion of the NASA network allocated to this part of the mission and payload.

With the special built Webex endpoints, and the special network between, that will allow communications back and forth.

“Those are the type of problems where we are really pushing the envelope and the available technology to do that much better, to do that much more,” he added.

Testing… Testing

To ensure the video will work as intended, the team is conducting end-to-end tests that simulate the constraints for the reality of deep space. Lockheed Martin, the other Callisto partner, is applying advanced lab tests, introducing for example, high latencies that simulate Houston talking to the Orion capsule near the moon.

“We can create conditions that require us to handle latency and other network conditions such as jitter, loss, et cetera,” Similar to the ‘wet dress’ for the shuttle, which tests its physical, logistics, and hardware, the equivalent is being done for Callisto to gauge its software, digital, and network performance.

Seeing is believing

Asked how collaborative video is expected to improve space missions, Luk categorized two types of scenarios that will, hopefully, revolutionize space exploration.

In the first, “If we can make collaboration occur in near real time, so I can see something and say, ‘Yes, no, left, right,’ and that reduces the time by say 40 hours, that means we’re shortening the time for the magic to happen.”

Luk recounted the square peg/round hole glitch on Apollo 13 (the Tom Hanks version) where the crew could only attempt to describe a critical hardware incompatibility verbally; “Imagine if we had video so the people in Houston could see the component, could see as Buzz Aldrin or someone else trying to make things fit. Imagine how much more effective that could be, instead of guessing if we're talking the same thing. That's one example of where seeing can lead to faster results, better results, ideally. That's the goal.”

The other is providing a ringside, or space side, seat for all the scientists and engineers who want to conduct a new generation of science and exploration but can’t or don’t want to travel to space. Since the ISS was built in space, 3,000+ science experiments have been performed. Video can open the door to scientists all around the world to see what's happening. “We can course correct, modify, change and continue experiments,” Luk said. “I can provide guidance to you, so that we can get the most out of what is a not cheap science experiment. Those are two examples where seeing leads to better results, and faster results."

A peek into the future

But Luk doesn’t expect the advances to stop there. Next could be holographic technology, providing, for example, a three-dimensional representation of a rock on the surface of the moon to make things go even faster. “I can see, understand, and say, ‘Flip it,’ or, ‘No, we've seen this one before’.” Combined with AI, computer vision and object recognition, “we could say, ‘This is a rock we've seen before, but that thing over there, that's unknown’."

For all the efforts and advances in space, Luk believes Callisto’s advances will spawn benefits for life on the ground as well. The compression technology, for example, will improve video in regions with poor internet connectivity, which can be leveraged for telehealth, education and more.

“We can take this and deploy it to the furthest most remote regions of any country or continent. We can lift those people up no matter where they are, and connect them to healthcare, education, whatever programs and support they need. That's just one great example of how the work that we're doing in pushing the envelope through Callisto is really going to drastically improve life here on earth.”

Click here to listen to the full interview.