January / February 2005


Canadian innovation helps transmit Titan Probe data across globe

Fastest route from Titan goes through CA*net4

As the Huygens Probe plunged through the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan earlier this month, 17 radio telescopes in Australia, China, Japan and the USA worked together to pick up the probe's faint radio signal containing unique and irreplaceable data - as much as 1.6 Terabytes of data per telescope.



After traveling 1.2 billion kilometres back to earth, the data had to make another challenging journey halfway around the world to the data processor in Dwingeloo, The Netherlands.

As it happens, the fastest route for that data to travel from Titan to the Netherlands goes through Canada, thanks to open source User Controlled LightPath (UCLP) software developed by Canadian research teams at Ottawa University’s Communications Research Centre, Waterloo University and the Université du Québec à Montreal under the direction of CANARIE engineers.

The UCLP software allows end users to control high-performance lightpath connections as if the link was a simple extension of their own local area network, empowering network users to create, subdivide and delete private sub-networks as needed.

Once the Huygens data made its way to Seattle on AARNet, Australia's Research and Education Network, the data switched to a lightpath built using UCLP, connecting CA*net 4 to New York, the Internet Educational Equal Access Foundation's trans-Atlantic capacity to SURFnet in Amsterdam to Dwingeloo.

With UCLP, it took Huygens researchers less than five minutes to set up a lightpath without waiting for CA*net 4 assistance, says Bill St. Arnaud, CANARIE’s Senior Director Network Projects. The researchers also used UCLP to build their lightpath from New York to Amsterdam.

“We received a request from the Australian researchers for access,” says St. Arnaud. “We gave them a password to access UCLP and they took care of everything else. It demonstrates the value of UCLP and the advantage moving control and management of the network to the edge, as opposed with a traditional engineering NOC (Network Operational Center) team.”

The main objective of the Huygens mission was to measure various properties of Titan's atmosphere and surface. A global international network of radio telescopes taking part in direct tracking of the transmission from the Huygens probe included the Australian radio telescopes of CSIRO, based near Narrabri, Coonabarabran and Parkes in NSW; those of the University of Tasmania, based in Hobart and Ceduna, South Australia, and 12 others based in China, Japan and the United States.

Using a technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), this network of radio telescopes collected data to pinpoint the probe during its descent through Titan's atmosphere.

There are also several more VLBI projects planned, including one linking radio telescopes around the world. Another involves connecting telescopes in Hawaii to CA*net 4.

St. Arnaud notes a similar project in the United Kingdom - the Faulkes Telescope project operates robotic telescopes in Hawaii and Australia that can be controlled over the Internet, and made available to students in schools in Commonwealth countries. “They have been looking for participation by Canadian schools. The nice thing about Faulkes is that when it is nighttime in Australia and Hawaii it is mostly day here, so it makes it easy for students to operate the telescope from the classrooms,” says St. Arnaud.

Since its launch two years ago, CA*net 4 has supported nearly two-dozen permanent and temporary lightpaths and there are more in the works, says St. Arnaud.

For example, CANARIE’s UCLP software was used to facilitate the world's first multi-stream HDTV demonstration, at a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) in Bangkok last week. Researchers from CANARIE and the Canada Research Council in Canada, KISTI in Korea, NCHC in Taiwan and i2CAT in Spain collaborated on the demonstration of a single end user controlling the setup of over 40,000 kilometers of lightpaths from Taiwan, Korea, Canada and Spain to enable multiple HDTV video streams to be delivered sequentially to the meeting.

The demonstration illustrated that in the future it will be possible for broadcasters and other users of multi-stream HDTV to quickly establish global optical lightpaths for sports and rapidly developing news events. More importantly they will be able to quickly reconfigure these networks to redistribute video feeds to other destinations.

CANARIE President and CEO Andrew Bjerring says Canadians have every reason to be proud of the development of UCLP software that links the fastest networks in the world. "It is essential that network access never becomes a bottleneck for Canadian and international research."

The UCLP project has been possible because of funding from CANARIE's Directed Research Program. The objective of the program is to act as a catalyst to making Canada a world leader in the design, development, delivery, and use of technology for user control of lightpaths on high-speed networks.

Learn more www.canarie.ca/funding/research/projects.html and www.faulkes-telescope.com.

Photo Credit: ESA-D. DUCROS / Artist's rendition of Huygens Probe entering the upper layers of Titan's atmosphere


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