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."

Comments

That's 25 terabytes

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Did the math for the mathally-challenged.

You're welcome.

Re:That's 25 terabytes

[radiumsoup]

That's 12,857,426 double-density 3.5" floppies, or 73,336 years' worth of free AOL

Re:That's 25 terabytes

[Anonymous Coward]

Which also comes out to around 1 Mbps of continuous data transfer over those 7 years. Not bad for communication from earth to mars.

Re:That's 25 terabytes

[Anonymous Coward]

What if it's on one of those old-ass mainframes with 6-bit bytes? What if it's encoded as if it's being transmitted over an analog modem (which it might very well be encoded that way)? That uses 10-bit bytes.

WHERE IS YOUR MATH GOD NOW?

Re:That's 25 terabytes

[MightyYar]

Well, sure, but NASA uses station wagons full of tapes hurtling through space.

Re:That's 25 terabytes

[FlyHelicopters]

How many Library's of Congress is that?

Re:That's 25 terabytes

[davester666]

Yes, Verizon will make a killing on penalty fee's for the Rover going over the data cap limit.

I'm disappointed

[deodiaus2]

That we haven't found Martians!

Re:Still too small of a 'pipe'

[ledow]

Why do humans need real-time video communication on Mars? It won't be real-time. Mars is 3 light-minutes away from Earth. The best we can hope for is a 6 minute lag between you asking a question and getting an answer.

And if you're going to have a six-minute lag, pretty much the bandwidth is irrelevant. It might as well be by the cheapest way possible, i.e. audio only with the occasional static picture for the "What the hell is this in the microscope?" questions.

The sheer bandwidth is also the problem. At 6 minute latencies, you're basically introducing more and more "buffers" to ensure correct data transmission. You won't know if what you sent was received properly until six minutes later. So you have to store AT LEAST six minutes of data (more likely lots more as you will have to retransmit).

The more bandwidth you wish to buffer, the larger storage that six minutes costs you. Six minutes of audio is nothing. A few hundred Kb. Six minutes of video is more. Six minutes of HD video is more again. And so on. And everything that you store / forward costs BIG money over interplanetary scales - from the broadcasting station itself (which can't reasonably ever be upgraded) to the DSN satellies around Mars to the receiving stations on Earth, and the more you send and the more you store and the faster you want to do it, the more it costs EVERYWHERE.

And, as you state, there is NO scientific value in this. So until humans are on the planet, it's really moot. But once they are there, HD video is the least of their concerns.

This is probably why you're not Director of Planetary Exploration at NASA, by the way.

Each human sperm holds the equivalent of 37.5mb...

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and one average ejaculation represents 15.8tb of information. By those standards, the ability to call it a success was a long time coming.

Re:Still too small of a 'pipe'

[grim4593]

It is even worse than that. The closest distance from Earth to Mars equates to about 3 minutes at light speed, the average is 14.1 minutes, and the longest is 15.22 minutes. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Distance+between+earth+and+mars

Re:Each human sperm holds the equivalent of 37.5mb

[sconeu]

Every sperm is sacred
Every sperm is good
Every sperm is needed
In your neighborhood.

Re:Still too small of a 'pipe'

[LordWabbit2]

All we need to do is to tell the Japanese that we have found a planet populated by a race of teenage school girls and another race of monsters with tentacles and we will have FTL in no time.

Re:Each human sperm holds the equivalent of 37.5mb

[delt0r]

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.