ISS astronauts using XenDesktop virtual desktop for Twitter and more

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 07 April 2010 10:58

Business IT - Technology

arlier this year, an astronaut on the International Space Station sent the first direct tweet from space. It's now been revealed that this was achieved by using a virtual desktop.

As previously reported by iTWire, on January 22, 2010, Timothy "TJ" Creamer became the first astronaut to make a direct Twitter post in space through a live Internet connection.

Previous tweets from space were emailed to the Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, and then relayed by ground-based personnel.

We now know that this historic tweet was actually made using a virtual desktop.

NASA's Crew Support LAN provides astronauts with virtual desktops that actually run on ground-based hardware. Although the available bandwidth is comparable to a home broadband connection, the relatively high latency means a virtual desktop can work better than conventional local applications, especially for accessing web sites.

The agency adopted Citrix XenDesktop for the virtual desktop platform and Citrix Branch Repeater to optimise the WAN connection by reducing bandwidth requirements and improving application performance.

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