 In the late 1990s NASA and Google began working on a new network protocol, Delay-tolerant networking (DTN) which automates this process, allows networking of spaceborne transmission nodes, and takes the fact into account that spacecraft can temporarily lose contact because they move behind the Moon or planets, or because space weather disrupts the connection.Under such conditions, DTN retransmits data packages instead of dropping them, as the standard TCP/IP Internet Protocol does.NASA conducted the first field test of what it calls the "deep space internet" in November 2008.