NASA explores blockchain for satellite communications

Quick Intake

NASA Explores Blockchain!

This time we have a use case for Satelite communications from NASA.

Blockchain has its proven use cases on establishing trust, Transparency, Privacy, and the important one being security! A lot of use cases have already proven this. Let’s see what role it can play now in Aerospace!

We do require robust controls and security mechanisms between the communication channels among the satellites, Uninterrupted protocols to have bidirectional information flows, Faster and Foolproof access mechanisms, etc.

And there we have a lot of space for blockchain to act !

With its unique capabilities, it can be used to secure the communication channels between the satellites, with the receptors, finding out the best way to route a message, Securing the Air locations of satelites etc..

Till now, NASA has been working on 3 blockchain projects being SCRAMBL (Space Communication Reconstruction and Mapping with Blockchain Ledgering) the recent one !

Happy Reading…

Earlier this week, NASA funded a blockchain project under its Small Business Technology Transfer Scheme. The project called SCRAMBL (Space Communication Reconstruction and Mapping with Blockchain Ledgering) is for inter-satellite communication.

The award of $124,817 was made to Orbit Logic, which will work in conjunction with the Fraunhofer USA Center for Experimental Software Engineering.

Where a satellite is part of a group or constellation of satellites, the blockchain will store shared data.

The objective is for one satellite node to be able to determine the best way to route a message to another node.

Last year ConsenSys launched a blockchain-based app for crowdsourcing satellite location data, TruSat.

This is the third blockchain award made by NASA. The other two projects involved a similar amount and were made in 2019.

Tietronix wants to use blockchain to securely share models for Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). The other was a more generic blockchain for use in space projects from Emergent Space Technologies.

Two years ago, NASA published a paper that outlined a blockchain prototype for transmitting air traffic location data. The aim was to enable privacy for the data.

Source of this Post