NASA puts ISPs to shame
IF YOU ARE PLEASED with your broadband connection bandwidth you could be a bit disappointed to find out how far behind the technology ball your local ISP might actually be.
NASA boffins are getting 461 gigabytes of data per day back from the Moon using a travelling wave tube amplifier.
According to Network World, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is using a pumped up communications device to deliver 461GB of data and images per day at a rate of up to 100 Mbps. It is also broadcasting it a hell of a long way.
Since most ISPs can manage only 1Mbps beyond about a mile from the local telco office, 100Mbps over 238,857 miles seems pretty good. Of course it is all one way and streaming NASA's LRO data feed into your porn collection is not going to be all that interesting unless you are into lunar rocks.
The LRO is equipped with the first high data rate K-band transmitter to fly on a NASA spacecraft. It was built by L-3 Communications Electron Technologies and uses electrodes in a vacuum tube to amplify microwave signals to high power.
It provides more power and efficiency than a transistor amplifier. It uses a new waveguide for input and output that adds strength to withstand mechanical shock and vibrations for enhanced reliability while travelling in space.
It is also starting to look like this technology could find its way into Earth satellites. NASA said that when stuck into a conventional satellites it could enable real-time data transfer.
Less powerful Traveling Wave Tube Amplifiers have been used for other planetary missions, such as Kepler and Cassini, but this one is lighter and therefore cheaper to get into space. µ
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.. just 100Mbps from LRO? Well, maybe that was the speed they were getting from probes sent to planets in space in the '60s and '70s but nowadays at the very least the LRO should transfer at no less than 100GBytes per second. Yep, I mean it.. that is the real transfer rates they are getting or more and so over 8500TeraBytes of data a day is what they are transferring just from LRO ...
Also, even if what they claim about the slow 100Mbps connection was true... didn't anyone still found it kinda fishy the simple fact that they are releasing subpar low resolution images (other than being heavily censored anyway..) that are worse than those made with a cell phone camera?
Well guys, I bid you farewell. Since after reading this I just decided to relocate all my family to the Moon, where at least I'll have a decent internet connection.
I which the best to all of you, once I'm far away. Let's see if Amazon delivers there...
I prefer the acronym TWAT - Travelling Wave Amplifier Tube.
Way back I used to be involved in the, er, heady field of Ham Radio contesting. Bobble hat and anorak to hand, we used TWTs in some of our microwave equipment. Believe me, you do not want to put your hand in front of the waveguide. Oh Lord no!
On internet everything going to DATA. Moe DATA there is, More Impossible to Decypher. Tinks' Ultee' jr has it right, 100 mb/s carrier to stram 250K cheap camera line. NOW Thats Webcaming with Extra TOP SECRET Twist.
vondrashek
ADSL1 here in Belgium does 5Mbit at 2 miles with ease.
And that's only ADSL1, ADSL2 does 8Mbit.
Cable does 25Mbit.
So Nick, your ISP rubbish, it's not the technology.
Heck in Holland they do 60Mbit on cable.
I'm not sure what you mean. The data transfer rates of most previous NASA probes were much lower than LRO. For example, Mars Pathfinder was only capable of 10Kbps (http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsn/faq-data.html).
Probes to other planets, and certainly those to the outer planets, require the Deep Space Network to receive and decode the signals. The signals are very low power, making them quite weak, and, not surprisingly, very slow in transmitting data. 100 Mbps from LRO is quite remarkable.
And, I'm no expert, but, even if LRO could transmit data at 100 GB/sec, I don't know if there is a(n) [economical] storage system out there that could even write the information quickly enough.
Sorry, I must be one lucky bastard. Comcast offers 100Mbit here, yes it costs $199.99 a month, but it's still 100Mbit.
@Joerg - According to globalsecurity.org U.S. combat operations use about 16Gbps of satellite bandwidth from multiple satellites (which I assume must represent technology within one generation from state of the art), this leads me to believe that your claim that the lunar orbiter should be capable of 100Gbps is unrealistic given current deployed technology, although it probably will be possible in 10 years.
Speed may be great, but from the point of view of relocating your family to the moon, I wouldn't bother, not at least for the great broadband speed anyway. The time it takes light to travel to the moon and hence any electromagnetic wave form used for communication would be ~1.29s. Multiply that by 2 and you get a round trip of ~2.58s at the very best. I wouldn't want to play on any Call of Duty 4 servers on earth with those ping times...lol...and don't get me started on the 60s/70s probes that have already left our solar system...lol
Just look at what is available in Asia and Europe. Results of real competition in those markets.
Cardboard should do fine in outer space, eh?
100Mbps, not 1000x that.
Not surprising, this company is the former Electron Tube division of Hughes Aircraft; they've been involved in space communications for decades.
Nice to see vacuum tubes are still useful in some applications.
And no, you don't want to put any part of your body in front of the waveguide.
That's how Raytheon came up with the idea for microwave ovens, BTW, the guys on the DEW (distant early warning) line in northern Canada in the 1950's and 1960's used to heat up their meals by placing them in front of the radar emitters. There are a couple of urban legend-type stories about guys that used to sit in front of the emitters to get a tan....to be discovered later thoroughly cooked.
They're operating in a vacuum, so maybe they made it "lighter" by getting rid of the tube?
$10 says it's all pr0n. All emerging technologies are.
When I worked on the Space Shuttle in the early 1990s we were getting data at 45Mbps from orbit to ground. Which in context of the 10Mbps ethernet that most of the ground computers were connected with, is pretty amazing. (The data was carried over fiber optics from the receiving station to the processing systems.) So yeah, it's not a big surprise that today's missions are also beaming data at rates far above consumer technology...
[quote]
NASA boffins are getting 461 gigabytes of data per day back from the Moon using a travelling wave tube amplifier.
According to Network World, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is using a pumped up communications device to deliver 461GB of data and images per day at a rate of up to 100 Mbps. It is also broadcasting it a hell of a long way.
[quote]
Just calculate!
(4 610 000 / 24) / 3 600 = 53.3564815
53Mbyte a second?
Man you are stupid!
100Mbit/sec is only ~12MByte/sec...
Made a 0 mistake :-)
But still I doubt you manage it.
I'm sure if I were willing to spend some odd hundreds of millions of dollars on a single device sending me back data that I could get my ISP to provide me even better datarates.
LRO stands for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, as in it orbits the moon and is thus behind the moon for half it's orbit, and can likely only download to Earth for less than half of each orbit due to the need for alignment with a ground station.
So if you do the maths again, presuming the LRO can only download for about ten and half hours out of each day.
461 GBytes x 1024 = 472,064 MBytes
472,064 MBytes x 8 = 3,776,512 Mbits
3,776,512 Mbits / 10.5 = 359,668 Mbit/Hour
359,668 Mbit/Hour / 3600 = ~100MBit/sec
If the LRO was in a geosynchronous orbit around Earth it could download just over a Terabyte of data a day, presuming there was no change in the data rate due to the vastly reduced transmission distance.
But my ISP told me if I'm close enough to an optical central(FTTH) of theirs then they offer me speeds at:
10 Mbps / 10 Mbps = 14€
100 Mbps / 10 Mbps = 20€
50 Mbps / 50 Mbps = 50€
100 Mbps / 100 Mbps = 100€
http://www.t-2.net/?ctxID=000565&funcID=1
Yes you are right.
It was late and I made a terrible mistake.
Shit happens :-)
By my estimate, that’s about 15MB of data on its way from the Moon to the Earth at any moment. That’s a lot of buffering at the Moon end if they’re doing reliable transmission. But then again, maybe they’re not—if anything gets lost or corrupted, it’s gone.
You might have to leave your computer cmd panel open a few weeks lol
Well here in South Africa I fork out about (US)$50 a month for a 2,5GB cap of data per month with an amazing 1,2Mbps line. I pay US 1c a MB or US$10 a Gig.
Use to have a 384Kbps line a year ago - but then I upgraded my tin cans and string.
Guess I too will be relocating to the Moon soon.
Begning to think most ppl live in countries that are still stuck in the dark ages. I have 100/10 from BBB, which is included in my rent.. no caps on speed or download limits.
no one is taking latency into consideration,
pretty sure it would be horrible.
sure they transfer that much, but how long does it take for a response.