From 1967 to 1972, the American space agency NASA conducted a series of space missions to the moon. Nearly 400 kilograms of soil samples were transported back to Earth. NGI—The Norwegian Geotechnical Institute is now using CT-scans of 10,000 lunar particles from the Apollo expeditions to study how lunar soils will behave when humans start engineering structures for the lunar surface.

In the near future, NASA's Artemis missions plan to send humans to the moon again for the first time in 50 years. This time, astronauts will potentially work and live on the moon for extended periods. But how to build a habitable base on the moon? What forces can the ground on the moon withstand? And with the conditions that are on the moon, how do materials, like a grain of lunar soil, behave?

You've done it. After years of effort and training, sacrifice, and pain, you become an astronaut and have finally set foot on Mars. Time to post your triumph on TikTok for that sweet social media cred. If only you can get a signal.

While that might seem like a silly scenario, the need for internet connectivity on Mars is real. It's not just a matter of allowing astronauts to doomscroll and post on Reddit. Landing humans on Mars will require a tremendous amount of data transfer with Earth, which is not easy. So how can we create an information network on Mars that is robust enough for both logistic and personal needs? A paper posted on the arXiv pre-print server proposes an idea.

The idea for an interplanetary internet isn't new. Astronauts on the International Space Station already have web access, though they often complain about its dialup-level speeds.