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NASA's Mars Orbiter Reaches Data Milestone
Nerval's Lobster writes "NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent 200 terabits of scientific data all the way back to Earth over the past seven years. That data largely comes from six instruments aboard the craft, and doesn't include the information used to manage the equipment's health. That 200-terabit milestone also surpasses the ten years' worth of data returned via NASA's Deep Space Network from all other missions managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. 'The sheer volume is impressive, but of course what's most important is what we are learning about our neighboring planet,' JPL's Rich Zurek, the project scientist for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, wrote in a statement. It takes roughly two hours for the craft to orbit Mars, recording voluminous amounts of data on everything from the atmosphere to the subsurface. Thanks to its instruments, we know that Mars is a dynamic environment, once home to water. 'Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has shown that Mars is still an active planet, with changes such as new craters, avalanches and dust storms,' Zurek added. 'Mars is a partially frozen world, but not frozen in time.' While the Orbiter's two-year 'primary science phase' ended in 2008, NASA has granted the hardware three additional extensions, each of which has resulted in additional insight into the Red Planet's secrets."
Did the math for the mathally-challenged.
You're welcome.
Sent from my ENIAC
That we haven't found Martians!
bottom of the cell phone bill says: $15 per 150 megabytes for overage charges (after the first 150 megabytes for $15 as part of the plan).. so essentially, it's $15 per 150 megabytes of data....
so.. lets turn bits into bytes and so forth, and we get:
200,000,000,000,000 / 8 / 1024 / 1024 / 150 * 15
equals
approx $2.4 million..
of course, that's not counting the outrageous data roaming surcharges that would apply in this case.
Considering the restrictions that Curiosity must go through when uploading data, I think it's clear that the bandwidth available to Mars is still way too low. It's easy to see this when you consider the next set of missions to the planet and what should be the goals of said missions - i.e. there's no reason why the 8minute landing couldn't be recorded at 1080p/60fps and uploaded the same day the next go around instead of the GIF we got in 2012.
For those saying that this isn't required for 'science', I'll respond by saying 'we should be done with science on this planet. It's time to send humans.' And when humans start traveling to Mars, we're going to need some serious bandwidth for real time video communication etc.
I thought they had a mandate to convert to the metric system...
"Your startup disk is almost full. You need to make more space available on your startup disk by deleting files."
and one average ejaculation represents 15.8tb of information. By those standards, the ability to call it a success was a long time coming.
Sent from my ENIAC
We didn't even send anyone there! Is it possible to explore space without sending anyone in space?
and one average ejaculation represents 15.8tb of information. By those standards, the ability to call it a success was a long time coming.
People PLEASE mod this up. It's too brilliant not to do so.
Every sperm is sacred
Every sperm is good
Every sperm is needed
In your neighborhood.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Call me when you reach 2 ^ (2 * (2 ^ 2 ^ 2) + 2 ^ 2 + 2)
but sneakernet does not count.
Just wondering if the martians count in base 10 like the cave men who count on their fingers and thumbs or if they've advanced to base 10 and powers thereof like some machines.
--
"There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who can count to 10, and those who can't." --unknown
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I was about to pen a witty reply when I realised the Internet had already delivered.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/169348-nasa-activates-622-mbps-laser-link-between-the-earth-and-moon
With the lazors on it, and 600 meg downlink these terabytes would fill up in no time.
The longer term plan for the LLCD is to use communications satellites to bounce transmissions between ground stations at 1.25 gigabits per second.
In other news, server lag from lunar orbit will remain a bitch for the foreseeable future.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Tell me when you hit Mars with your handjob.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Mass duplication of data doesn't count. If you used a compression method on that ejected DNA you would find that is probably not even 10-20Gbyte of data.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
do as you say no?
http://www.firstpost.com/india/why-western-criticism-of-indias-mars-mission-is-blatant-racism-1224419.html/
would not want anyone to accuse the west of hypocrisy, now would we?
You have to do the numbers in high density 3.5" (1.44MB formatted) ... so 18,222,223 disks for 25TB.
And I have no idea how you got 12.8 million (DD = 800kB or 720kB depending on formatting). Your numbers suggest 2.038MB per floppy ... some HD 3.5" were marketed as "2MB" but that was *unformatted*. And the rounding error is likely from 1024 vs. 1000 multiples between kB/MB/GB/TB.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I'm not sure how to read that sentance. JPL manages missions, and they also manage the DSN. But missions managed at APL, GSFC, MSFC and other places *also* use the DSN.
And DSN's much older than 10 years ... Voyager uses it, and it was launched in 1977.
It sounds to me like they just picked a convenient time for their 'more than' comparison, and even then didn't even compare it to the whole thing, only some subset.
(disclaimer : I work for some missions that use the DSN, that aren't managed by JPL)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.