Crunching Numbers for Cosmic Communications

Department of Mathematics graduate students, Tatum Rask and Jacob Cleveland, took their number-crunching skills to new heights at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center as a part of the Space Communications and Navigation Internship Project (SIP). 

The goal of SIP is to equip young professionals with essential skills and experiences, guided by expert mentors, to contribute to NASA’s Exploration and Space Communications project. 

“My internship and my group’s work are laying the foundation for a solar system internet,” Rask said. She emphasized the importance of a strong mathematical foundation for the future implementation of a solar system communication method. 

“For one, scalability introduces some challenges,” she said. There are thousands of satellites that orbit Earth to help communication take place in space, just like they help us make calls or send texts on Earth. 

“To help address [the thousands of satellites], it would be helpful to establish subdomains of a network so that we may do more efficient routing,” said Rask. 

Subdomains would be like a small neighborhood in a big city of satellites. “However, establishing subdomains is especially hard in a time-varying setting. Since satellites are always on the move, these subdomains will be constantly changing. The projects we worked on addressed these issues.” 

Rask’s focus was on sheaf theory, a mathematical tool used as an analogy to understand and manage the flow of data over networks. 

For Cleveland, his understanding of space communications transformed during his time at NASA. Engaged in diverse projects, including mathematical sheaves, star tracking algorithms and time synchronization algorithms, he recognized the infancy of delay tolerant networking for space networks. Delay tolerant networking is a networking architecture designed to allow devices to store and forward messages opportunistically when connectivity is available. 

Cleveland emphasized the need for advanced mathematical machinery to address fundamental problems in space communication, considering the problems too complicated to be solved by simply modifying communication networks on Earth. He envisioned a solar system internet (SSI) enabling more efficient data collection in space and on Earth. 

“These machines are tools which are designed to create structure from chaos,” Cleveland said. 

Cleveland expressed confidence in achieving an SSI, recognizing the tireless efforts of giant teams working collaboratively across NASA centers and space agencies worldwide to get the job done. 

Both Rask and Cleveland credited their mentors and the supportive community at NASA for their professional and mathematical growth during this internship and expressed gratitude for helpful discussions with past NASA interns. 

As these CSU students returned to campus, their experiences at NASA have not only advanced their academic pursuits but also contributed to NASA’s broader mission of shaping the future of aerospace communication and navigation technologies. 

The SIP program continues to connect passionate students with NASA mentors, laying the groundwork for innovations that will define the agency’s exploration endeavors.