Lifeboat Foundation

Published: 5:00am, 18 Jun, 2020

Aquatic internet that sends data through light beams could enable divers to instantly transmit footage from under the sea to the surface.

The internet is an indispensable communication tool, connecting tens of billions of devices worldwide, and yet we struggle to connect to the web from under water. “People from both academia and industry want to monitor and explore underwater environments in detail,” explains the first author, Basem Shihada. Wireless internet under the sea would enable divers to talk without hand signals and send live data to the surface.

Underwater communication is possible with radio, acoustic and visible light signals. However, radio can only carry data over short distances, while acoustic signals support long distances, but with a very limited data rate. Visible light can travel far and carry lots of data, but the narrow light beams require a clear line of sight between the transmitters and receivers.

The internet connectivity constellation, designed for high speed and low latency, is taking shape.

A new visualization shows the SpaceX Starship releasing new Starlink satellites.

Now, the same researchers have achieved their goal of entanglement-based quantum cryptography using the Micius satellite. The scientists, who detailed their findings online in the 15 June edition of the journal Nature, say they again connected two observatories separated by 1,120 kilometers. But this time, the collection efficiency of the links was improved by up to four-fold, which resulted in data rates of about 0.12 bits per second.

A space-based, virtually unhackable quantum Internet may be one step closer to reality due to satellite experiments that linked ground stations more than 1,000 kilometers apart, a new study finds.

Quantum physics makes a strange effect known as entanglement possible. Essentially, two or more particles such as photons that get linked or “entangled” can influence each other simultaneously no matter how far apart they are.

Continue reading “Quantum Satellite Links Extend More Than 1,000 Kilometers” »

Mike Stewart was able to recover the previously lost Apollo 10 LM software, as flown (also known as Luminary 69 Rev 2). He shows us how he did it, which, fair warning, is a pretty technical hack. And contrary to (yet another) internet myth, the flown software would have been perfectly capable of landing Apollo 10 on the Moon.

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Continue reading “Recovering the Lost Apollo 10 LM Software” »

Quantum key distribution (QKD)^1,2,3 is a theoretically secure way of sharing secret keys between remote users. It has been demonstrated in a laboratory over a coiled optical fibre up to 404 kilometres long^4,5,6,7. In the field, point-to-point QKD has been achieved from a satellite to a ground station up to 1,200 kilometres away^8,9,10. However, real-world QKD-based cryptography targets physically separated users on the Earth, for which the maximum distance has been about 100 kilometres^11,12. The use of trusted relays can extend these distances from across a typical metropolitan area^13,14,15,16 to intercity¹⁷ and even intercontinental distances¹⁸. However, relays pose security risks, which can be avoided by using entanglement-based QKD, which has inherent source-independent security^19,20. Long-distance entanglement distribution can be realized using quantum repeaters²¹, but the related technology is still immature for practical implementations²². The obvious alternative for extending the range of quantum communication without compromising its security is satellite-based QKD, but so far satellite-based entanglement distribution has not been efficient²³ enough to support QKD. Here we demonstrate entanglement-based QKD between two ground stations separated by 1,120 kilometres at a finite secret-key rate of 0.12 bits per second, without the need for trusted relays. Entangled photon pairs were distributed via two bidirectional downlinks from the Micius satellite to two ground observatories in Delingha and Nanshan in China. The development of a high-efficiency telescope and follow-up optics crucially improved the link efficiency. The generated keys are secure for realistic devices, because our ground receivers were carefully designed to guarantee fair sampling and immunity to all known side channels^24,25. Our method not only increases the secure distance on the ground tenfold but also increases the practical security of QKD to an unprecedented level.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=awnuJaEDVc4

Were they paratroopers with flashlights, satellites or, as Internet users point out, a flying saucer?

SpaceX successfully launched its first Starlink rideshare mission into orbit today (June 13), lofting 58 Starlink internet satellites along with three Earth-observation satellites before nailing a rocket landing at sea.