Moon Talk: LTE's Giant Leap Towards Lunar... - Marcin Szczukiewicz, Borys Szefczyk - code::dive 2023

Moon Talk: LTE's Giant Leap Towards Lunar Connectivity

Space, once the domain of the few, is opening its doors more widely to humanity. Today we are honored to share a story that enabled ordinary people like us to participate in the preparation of a space mission.

Our story will focus on a NASA-funded project to demonstrate advanced lunar communications using technology we all use every day. Nokia, powered by the research of Nokia Bell Labs, is going to deploy the first 4G/LTE network on the Moon to evaluate its performance and suitability for proximity communications on the lunar surface. In our talk, we will explain what it takes to make this happen, how are we going to get there and what do we want to achieve. We will explain the role of our partners Intuitive Machines and Lunar Outpost in this big project. We will discuss why modernizing communications on the Moon is so important and how to deploy and operate a 4G/LTE cellular network on the Moon without actually going there - after all, there is no one there to press the power-on button.

Join us on an extraordinary journey, into the future of space communications, paving the way for the first selfie from the Moon!

About the speaker - Marcin Szczukiewicz

Graduated with degrees in Electronics and Telecommunications as well as Data Science. First, in charge of developing and designing networks for telecom providers. For the past 14 years, he has been a key contributor to Nokia's divisions, specializing in software testing for 3G, 4G, and 5G radio base stations, with a focus on driving innovation in test automation and testing processes.

One of the creators and managers of the Unified Test Environment a solution which is offering thousands of remote test environments in the cloud for 3G, 4G, and 5G R&D teams across Nokia's global divisions. This achievement earned recognition as a finalist in the prestigious Nokia Quality Awards™ and was showcased at the International User Conference on Advanced Automated Testing, organized by ETSI.

Additionally, since 2018, he has been leading a group of developers, managing resources for projects related to the lunar mission. This endeavor aims to establish a telecommunications network on the Moon, marking a significant milestone in space exploration.

Privately, he enjoys amateur sports and is passionate about astronomy and space exploration.

About the speaker - Borys Szefczyk

Passion for science and discovery is what drives Borys' career path. He started as a computational chemists exploring the nano- world of proteins using computer simulations and molecular modelling. He graduated from the Wroclaw University of Technology and obtained a PhD in physical and theoretical chemistry; then he continued his work as a researcher at the University of Porto in Portugal. He co-authored 26 papers in top international journals in the field of computational chemistry. Always a passionate programmer (Python since its 1.x versions) he continued his career focusing on software development. Since 2019 he works as a Python developer at Nokia. In a "big bang" kind of transition he switched from modelling the tiny universe of particles to the space industry, developing software for a lunar mission.