"The father of the Internet, Vint Cerf, is overseeing efforts by NASA to build a permanent Internet link to Mars by 2008."

InterPlaNet (IPN) will serve as a backbone for a future inter-planetary system of Internets, said Cerf during a visit to Bangalore, reports Indo Asian News Service.

Google vice president and Internet evangelist, Cerf co-wrote the TCP/IP protocol which underpins the Terran internet in the 1970s and began work on the InterPlaNet in 1998.

A collaboration between NASA and the Advanced Research Project Agency, the InterPlaNet project is underway at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Houston, Texas. The InterPlaNet protocol is designed to cope with delays caused by the vast distances of space, with data taking up to 20 minutes to travel between the Earth and Mars depending on how far apart the two planets are.

(Via /.)