A relatively limited budget of $15 million for a new NASA satellite has encouraged engineers to turn to the Internet for inexpensive ways to actually operate the spacecraft and its communications with Earth.

Mission managers will actually be able to operate the spacecraft from anywhere that has an Ethernet port with Web access.

The Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer (CHIPS) spacecraft will examine the stuff between stars, the so-called void of space that is actually rich with hot gas.

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, used by many somewhat Web-savvy surfers to move files from one computer to another across the Internet.

CHIPS is the first mission selected under NASA's University-class Explorer's Program. It has turned out to be a 131 pound (45 kilogram) satellite roughly the size of a large suitcase and will be launched in early January as a secondary payload to NASA's ICESat (Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite) on a Delta II rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The launch was postponed from December 19 due to technical difficulties regarding the separation of the payload from the launch vehicle. The craft is being built by the University of California's Space Sciences Laboratory and SpaceDev, a private firm also based in California.

The mission’s $15 million budget is dictated by the program guidelines.

Most NASA missions with larger budgets use dedicated radio-receiver time and other lines to transmit data from space down to Earth and around to various processing sites. But the cost and paperwork associated with doing this, Janicik says, can be too much for smaller missions like CHIPS.

The dedicated lines, such as those used by the Hubble Space Telescope and the military, have the advantage of being very secure, but they also require computer programmers to write brand new software to handle the data. The network of ground stations that pass around the information from satellites has existing protocols that need to be integrated with the software to handle the data from the satellite.

"It ends up adding burden, which could equate to power increases, so now you need more power on your satellite," Janicik says. But with commercial software, all those protocols are already built-in.

Using the Internet also gives the CHIPS team more mobility. "We can set up a missions control station anywhere…as long as it has an Ethernet port that has access to the Internet," Janicik says.

And to compensate for the loss of security, the mission designers have added in measures like those that online merchants use for credit-card transactions.

"There are many levels, again taking advantage of standard commercial security features, that we've built into an entire end-to-end communications architecture," Janicik said.

The CHIPS team also cut costs by using commercial parts.

"It's full of many off-the-shelf components, which is a cost saving measure," says Mark Hurwitz, the mission’s principal investigator from the University of California, Berkeley. "This is not something that's put together out of high-reliability military parts. I have a personal expectation and a personal hope, of course, that it will work."

But if it fails, Hurwitz has an optimistic outlook.

"There's been a whole crew of young engineers who have cut their teeth on this thing and if NASA is fortunate enough to keep them engaged in space flight projects, they're going to benefit other projects downstream."