The James Webb Place Telescope can crank out nearly 60GB of information every day

In a nutshell: Contrary to Hubble which orbits near sufficient to Earth for astronauts to reach if have to have be, the new James Webb Room Telescope is around a million miles from house. That makes it practically unserviceable (at minimum in the around phrase), which means NASA experienced to equip it with only the most trustworthy and hardened hardware prior to sending it off into space.

All facts gathered by Webb is saved locally on a 68GB good-state drive, and a few per cent of the room is reserved for engineering and telemetry data. All items deemed, Webb can acquire up to 57GB of science info for each day relying on the concentrate on it is observing.

Webb demands to offload its facts every day in get to stay clear of operating out of place. It does this by using a 25.9-gigahertz channel on the Ka-band at speeds up to 28 megabits per next. The observatory also utilizes two channels in the S-band including a 2.09-GHz uplink that receives long term transmission and observation schedules from Earth at 16 kilobits for each second and a 2.27-GHz, 40-kb/s downlink to deliver engineering details back again house.

For comparison, Hubble can generate up to 2GB of data day by day.

Webb is portion of the Deep Space Community (DSN), a global communications community with ground facilities positioned in the US, Spain and Australia that supports various spacecraft missions. All of its communications channels use the Reed-Solomonerror-correction protocol, which is also used in QR codes and Blu-ray / DVDs.

Webb will only wipe its SSD to totally free up area following it gets affirmation that its existing info has productively made it to Earth.

Webb's SSD should not degrade way too much over time, either. By the finish of its planned 10-yr mission, NASA expects it to still be capable to keep all over 60GB of info.