Nasa and the European Space Agency have successfully used their experimental interplanetary internet system to control a Lego robot on Earth from the International Space Station.

Sunita Williams, commander of Expedition 33 aboard the ISS, used the Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol to drive a little Lego robot at the European Space Operations Centre in Germany to demonstrate the protocol's use as a method of controlling technology on a planet's surface from orbit.

The DTN system is designed to enable standardised communications with distant technologies -- deep spacecraft and orbital systems, for example -- without being hampered by the associated long distances and time delays.

As such, the Bundle Protocol -- analogous to the Internet Protocol used by the terrestrial internet -- is able to work around disconnections and errors by moving data in bursts across parts of the network as links become available rather than requiring a continuous connection between the source and destination.

"The demonstration showed the feasibility of using a new communications infrastructure to send commands to a surface robot from an orbiting spacecraft and receive images and data back from the robot," said Badri Younes, deputy associate administrator for space communications and navigation at Nasa headquarters. "The experimental DTN we've tested from the space station may one day be used by humans on a spacecraft in orbit around Mars to operate robots on the surface, or from Earth using orbiting satellites as relay stations."

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