Working as part of a NASA-wide team, engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US, used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about 20 million miles from earth, the agency said.

"This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an inter-planetary Internet," said Adrian Hooke, team lead and manager of space-networking architecture, technology and standards at NASA headquarters in Washington.

Google's role

According to the space agency, NASA and Vint Cerf, a vice president at Google, partnered 10 years ago to develop the DTN software protocol.

NASA said this protocol sends information using a method that differs from the normal Internet's transmission-control protocol/Internet protocol, or TCP/IP, communication suite, which Cerf co-designed. Unlike TCP/IP on earth, the DTN does not assume a continuous end-to-end connection. In its design, if a destination path cannot be found, the data packets are not discarded. Instead, each network node keeps the information as long as necessary until it can communicate safely with another node.