TCP Enabled Spacecraft

Cool... I wonder if you can ping it?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. "CHIPS will be the first mission ever to use end-to-end satellite operations over the Internet with TCP/IP and FTP," says Jeff Janicik, SpaceDevs program manager and flight director for the mission, the company?s first. "What that means is, essentially, the entire ground and flight software architecture are based on standard Internet protocols that you use everyday with PCs. Its like FTPing a file from space."
http://space.com/businesstechnology/technology/chips_tech_021218.html