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NASA Probe Blasts 461 Gigabytes of Moon Data Daily
coondoggie writes "On its current space scouting mission, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is using a pumped up communications device to deliver 461 gigabytes of data and images per day, at a rate of up to 100 Mbps.
As the first high data rate K-band transmitter to fly on a NASA spacecraft, the 13-inch-long tube, called a Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier, is making it possible for NASA scientists to receive massive amounts of images and data about the moon's surface and environment.
The amplifier was built by L-3 Communications Electron Technologies in conjunction with NASA's Glenn Research Center. The device uses electrodes in a vacuum tube to amplify microwave signals to high power. It's ideal for sending large amounts of data over a long distance because it provides more power and more efficiency than its alternative, the transistor amplifier, NASA stated." It kills me that the moon has better bandwidth than my house.
Their Cingular bill is going to suck.
But can it learn to love?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm sure you can still beat the moon in latency.
Hope they don't try anything over bittorrent.. that could add a bit of latency
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
It may have better BW than your house, but the ping is going to suck.
Or would you like your internet connection to be served by a SUV carrying hard drives?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
It may have better bandwidth, but I hope you have less latency then the 1.25 sec on the moon(1).
1 - http://www.vendian.org/envelope/dir0/light_delay.html
But of course, "In Space, No One Can Hear You Spam"...
Now the internet is a series of vacuum tubes?
Traveling Wave Tubes have been a mainstay of microwave communications and radar systems for the better part of a century. They're a very efficient way of amplifying microwave signals to the very high power levels needed to cross long distances.
Do you have ESP?
Does torrent work on it?
It kills me that the moon has better bandwidth than my house.
Oh, but the latency sucks. Try playing WoW with over a second of lag.
They are using a radar set as a data link. I'm wondering whether they are still using it as a radar to map the moon too, by using a different set of antennas.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Tag vacuumtube
Anybody else think it's funny that in this case, a vacuum tube is a step up from a transistor?
Did they even bother to seal the tube, or are they using the vacuum of space?
Maybe this technology could be used to further enhance wireless communication here on earth? How about 100 gigabit wireless backhauls - or even better, 100mbit wireless to your phone? I dunno, anybody have any data on these devices?
http://www.l-3com.com/products-services/
You just KNOW that the original name for the device was "Traveling Wave Amplified Tube" until some NASA jackass noticed the acronym and ruined it for everyone.
With slight googling: http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/RT/2007/Comm/04-RCE-force.html
I attended a 2 year electronics engineering college (shout out to Electronic Institutes in Highspire PA!!) in the early '90s with the aim of learning enough about vacuum tube circuitry to design and build best-in-class guitar and audiophile amplifiers. My instructors looked at me like I was insane, insisting that solid state and digital was poised to take over everything in the industry.
Funny how those old-fangled tubes are providing data transfer this fast over nearly 400,000km distance.
My Human Gets Me Blues.
Just more proof that we have regressed since the last moon landing. As long as you ignore all of the probes that are shooting around planets and the solar system, and landing on things, absolutely nothing has changed.
no wonder the images NASA shows us are sweet, warm, smooth, full, and very detailed. Must be a NOS tube they are using
Its gonna be a bitch to filter out the aliens from all those pictures.
You mean to tell me the Internet really is a series of tubes?!
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
As the first high data rate K-band transmitter to fly on a NASA spacecraft, the 13-inch-long tube, called a Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier, is making it possible for NASA scientists to receive massive amounts of images
Why don't they just use bittorrent if they want high transfer speeds?
... and then they built the supercollider.
That much data and Comcast would throttle it no matter what the scientists said. If AT&T had it going through their "unlimited" 3G connection, NASA would be hosed and we would be increasing the national debt by trillions.
One last thing, I m wondering if the **AA doesn't want access to the data stream to make sure it isn't a bittorrent containing their precious copyrighted work. After all, we all know there is no legitimate use for that much bandwidth.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
It was not new technology then.
so ...they've spent billions of dollars on a supersized pringles cantenna?
"Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier" is the most silly name I have ever heard for a can of Pringles :)
____
nico
Nico-Live
TWT amps have been used in microwave systems since the 2nd world war. The use of TWT in satellites are recent, as in 25-30 years ago. The NSA's LACROSSE and the new ONYX satellites use TWT amps in the finals on their radar systems. The Soviet ROARSAT's probably use them as well, or something similar, they love to overbuild their stuff.
Hell, the YF-12a used 2 TWT's in tandem in its Hughes AN/ASG-18 radar, putting out over 10MW of raw power.
But they are power gobblers, The YF-12A's ate over 40KVA of juice to operate.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
The device uses electrodes in a vacuum tube to amplify microwave signals to high power.
Shooting high power microwaves at us eh? Guess we've solved the mystery of global warming...
I'd like to see a REAL color photograph at some point and not something they recolored after... and real video footage as opposed to footage put together from still images
Of course not, twats have been around for millions of years.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm sure you could get that kind of bandwidth at your house, too, if you paid enough for it.
So they're using a high-tech cantenna?!? I bet they'll be getting a call from the FCC any minute now....
Everyone up there has to share the same 100Mbps link..... Oh, wait
not only does the moon have faster data transfer rates than your house, but often times its transmitting far more interesting and pertanent data than the connection at your house.
unless 4chan has a section for materials science and physics now?
Good people go to bed earlier.
"It kills me that the moon has better bandwidth than my house."
How much is NASA paying for their connection vs. how much are you paying?
CmdTaco comments in the original posting:
It kills me that the moon has better bandwidth than my house.
I know that Taco's trying to be funny here, but, seriously, the moon should most certainly have better bandwidth. That is to say, a research project that is able to afford a custom solution to a highly specialized problem with plenty of money to throw at had damned well better have better performance than what is available to commodity markets. I expect this to be true just as nearly every other bit of the hardware they send up will be better, faster, stronger, lighter, and more able to withstand ionizing radiation than the equivalent, when available, from K-Mart. There's a good reason these projects cost hundreds of millions of dollars for a probe to be sent somewhere. The Mars rovers, as another example, are using a 256 kbps channel -- deployed five years ago when DSL was still considered fast -- over a distance that ranges 55 to 400 million miles. Now *that's* performance.
It actually rather amazes me that Taco's or anyone else's house has close to the bandwidth available from the moon.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
It kills me that the moon has better bandwidth than my house.
That why its called "Rocket Science".
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I, for one, would like to welcome our new FPS overlord - 133tM00nK1LL3r
Or is this an example of someone not knowing bits versus bytes?
461 GB of data is 461*1024*1024*1024 bytes (yes, I do it right because unlike so many I understand storage) = 494,994,980,860 bytes. Times 8 for bits = 3,959,959,846,900 bits.
A day is 60*60*24 = 86,400 seconds.
# of bits claimed/# of seconds in day = 45,832,869 bps or 45,833 Kbps or 46 Mbps.
Yep, better than I get at home, too.
100 Mbps --> 8,640,000 Mbits/day, or 1,080,000 MB per day or about 1 TB/day possible bandwidth.
"massive amounts of images and data"
Won't this clog the tubes?
13" Tube http://www.pringles.com/pages/index.shtml
Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier
..and there's always the advantage of having data with a warmer, richer feel to it than using a solid-state amp. Just think how much better the data will be once they start storing it on vinyl!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
And no one thought of calling it the Traveling Wave Amplification Tube ?!
Nah, that's not officially certified vacuum and much too simple. Only the Russians would do this !
NASA is bright enough to NOT use an American broadband or cellular company.
Now we only need to know how many Library of Congress can be transfer each day?
or should we switch our Library of Congress unit to Data transmitted per day from the Moon?
In fact the limited factor is recording speed and capacity. The large atom-smashers run the receptor data through a preliminary A.I. discrmination programs which save the small fraction deemed interesting. Then slaving grad students will spend years on tiny pieces extacting the significant discoveries.
Some of the large ground telescopes are partnering with Google and MicroSoft to put large portions of their data online. The computer programs and main scientists only have enough time to give a cursory glance at it. Maybe it will be a kid in a junior high school science lab that looks at something more closely and makes a discovery. Some of this is occuring with google earth imagery now.
but for high power, squirrelly conditions, and reliability under real world conditions, tubes are still the go-to player in a lot of situations. a solar storm will roach semiconductor outputs, but it takes a monster pulse straight down the gullet to take a tube out.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
curious thing about tubes, they don't become useful until they're sealed in vacuum, and boiled out in a high RF magnetic field to take impurities off the elements. and then you have to flash the last of the gases off by igniting a getter inside the envelope.
that provides a higher vacuum on earth, inside the tube, than you can ever develop in space. and the electrons can do their work, instead of hitting stuff and just making a useless glow.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
You wouldn't like the latency though.
Question everything
Back when I was in electronics school, these were called "Traveling Wave Amplifier Tubes"....seriously. Some prude changed it to the grammatically awkward "Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier" just so us engineers couldn't have fun talking about broken TWATs at work!!!!!
I guess that would count as previous art if nasa were to patent the twat :)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Photographers call transparencies "trannys", car people call transmissions "trannys", now here's yet another one.
Great. Now I can just tell my wife I was on the phone with the garage and she won't get suspicious.
So my country can torrent pics FROM THE MOON at 1.5MB/s and I'm still stuck at 150KB/s downloading pictures from 1 mile away in Chicago. US ISPs are full of shit.
Compiler Error: Symbol 'COTS' redefined in NASA.h at 2009.
Commmon Off The Shelf [components] (Military design goals program from the 90's)
From TFA:
Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (NASA)
'It kills me that the moon has better bandwidth than my house.'
Yeah well, I bet the thing did cost couple of digits more than your house
ISS (space station) has been using K band for 8-9 years now. This may be the first K-band system used on a lunar mission....
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
It should have been called the T ravelling W ave A mplifier T ube not the other way around. dammit!