NASA's Mars Orbiter Reaches Data Milestone 68
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."
That's 25 terabytes (Score:4, Informative)
Did the math for the mathally-challenged.
You're welcome.
Re:That's 25 terabytes (Score:5, Funny)
That's 12,857,426 double-density 3.5" floppies, or 73,336 years' worth of free AOL
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139 nine-track tapes.
84 CDC 9766 disk packs.
122.3 service calls to the Skydrive helpdesk in Gurgaon.
Re:That's 25 terabytes (Score:5, Funny)
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From the best estimate I've seen, about 1/10th of a Library of Congress
No one uses double density 3.5" anymore (Score:2)
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.
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I don't understand these "bits" you talk about... how many punch cards is that?
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Hell, that's better than some outlying regions of Scotland have got for their "broadband" Internet connections.
Re:That's 25 terabytes (Score:5, Funny)
Well, sure, but NASA uses station wagons full of tapes hurtling through space.
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Wait till they get fiber
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Yes, Verizon will make a killing on penalty fee's for the Rover going over the data cap limit.
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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?
Each human sperm holds the equivalent of 37.5mb... (Score:5, Funny)
and one average ejaculation represents 15.8tb of information. By those standards, the ability to call it a success was a long time coming.
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Every sperm is sacred
Every sperm is good
Every sperm is needed
In your neighborhood.
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I was about to pen a witty reply when I realised the Internet [reddit.com] had already delivered.
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Tell me when you hit Mars with your handjob.
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Yes, but that's just the marketing numbers by the manufacturer.
You'll only *really* get 22 TiB 755 GiB 65 MiB 932 KiB
I'm disappointed (Score:2)
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NASA is on prepay.
Re:Still too small of a 'pipe' (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I do dream bigger.
I'd rather send a bunch more people up there and fuck the real-time video and bandwidth.
We're supposed to be colonising, not annexing Facebook.
Re:Still too small of a 'pipe' (Score:5, Informative)
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It won't be next week, but it is possible within our lifetime.
Sending data FTL will be much easier than sending people FTL, far less mass to contend with.
Someone smart will figure it out.
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Er, um... so I've seen, ahh heard... well, been told... um, what were we talking about again?
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This may explain why no Martians have signed up for Obamacare.
RE: NASA still using miles? (Score:1)
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Don't tell the BBC - I was just listening to a guy on there talking about the typhoon that hit the Philippines in terms of miles per hour.
Error (Score:1)
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No one there? That's what they want you to think. Statistically with that volume of data being sent back there has to be petabytes of infringing content being sent TO Mars. It's a colony of space pirates. The content industry should ready their lawyers.
Binary terabits or marketing terabits? (Score:1)
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
LADEE would do that pretty quick (Score:2)
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/169348-nasa-activates-622-mbps-laser-link-between-the-earth-and-moon [extremetech.com]
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.
... missions managed by JPL? (Score:2)
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