Trans-Pacific Demonstrations (TPD): remote astronomy demonstration and results

Abstract

In 1993, a proposal at the Japan-US Science, Technology, and Space Applications Program (JUSTSAP) workshop led to a subsequent series of satellite communications experiments and demonstrations, under the title of Trans-Pacific High Data Rate Satellite Communications Experiments. The first phase of this was a joint collaboration between government and industry teams in the United States and Japan that successfully demonstrated distributed high definition video (HDV) post-production on a global scale using a combination of high data rate satellites and terrestrial fiber optic asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks [1-3]. This was followed by the Phase-2 Internet Protocol (IP) based experiments and demonstrations [4-7] in tele-medicine and astronomical distance education, using another combination of two high data rate satellites and terrestrial fiber optic networks. This paper describes the Phase-2 remote astronomy experiment in detail. This experiment established a heterogeneous ground- and space-based network between Japan and several sites in the US, which was used by students, scientists, and educators to provide real-time interaction and collaboration with the 14-inch Telescopes in Education (TIE) telescope and associated data archive. The remote astronomy activity demonstrated collaborative observation and distance education at multiple locations around the globe and the transparent operations of distributed systems technologies over a combination of broadband satellites and terrestrial networks. The use of Internet Protocol related technologies allowed the general public to be an integral part of the exciting activities, helped to examine issues in constructing a global information infrastructure with broadband satellites, and afforded an opportunity to tap the research results from the (reliable) multicast and distributed systems communities. In this paper, we describe the network infrastructure at both the technical and user levels, review the operation of the experiment, and summarize our lessons learned. We find that such networking, while still somewhat complex to construct on highly distributed scales, can provide educators and students with a unique collaborative environment which greatly enhances the educational experience.