Streaming From the Moon and Beyond
Problem Statement
NASA announced that in 2027, the Artemis III mission will live stream the moon landing and astronaut activity using a combination of suit-mounted and stationary cameras. With limited bandwidth (approx 6mb/s) and specialized equipment, NASA needs to optimize encoding, distribution (from moon to Earth), and delivery (from mission control to various end-points including traditional broadcasters and streaming platforms).
Project Description
The Artemis III mission, slated for mid-2027, will seek to land astronauts on the moon’s South Polar region. This manned mission will be live-streamed across the entire Earth.
While the sheer scale of this live event could be in the hundreds of millions of concurrent viewers, there are a number of challenges that NASA needs to address even before tackling that scale (such as trying to get an HD, HDR-enabled stream from the surface of the moon to the Earth with limited bandwidth).
Goals and Objectives
The objective and goals of this project are:
Project Scope
The following will be generally addressed in this project:
- Optimization of content capture and transmission from space
- Optimization of codec efficiency, encoding profiles, and compression
- Recommendation and optimization of transmission protocols to minimize latency, maximize flexibility, and ensure the highest quality
- Recommendations for overall architecture and individual components
- Optimization of content transmission through the delivery architecture
- Processing techniques to increase data throughput or recall for ground operations
- An approach to increasing the bandwidth available to downlink more or higher quality videos
- The application of AI to encoding technology to increase efficiency and bandwidth optimization
- Training the encoding algorithm specific to the terrain of the remote stellar body (i.e., the Moon, Mars, etc.)
- Finding ways to ensuring that content is UHD when available
- A build-of-materials (BOM) or other hardware-related engineering specifications
- Recommendations of specific vendors
Contributors
The following members have contributed to this project. Click on their name to visit their profile. If they have not published their profile, the link will redirect to their LinkedIn profile.
Additional References
The following are resources which might help to provide context and understanding:
- Artemis III Mission details
- Streaming From the Moon and Beyond presentation slides (presented at Q1 2025 Member Meeting in Tucson, AZ)
Presentations
There are no presentations associated with this project.