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AFAIK, these telescopes produce a lot of data. Do we send this data back to Earth, or keep it on the moon and work on it remotely? Do we have the bandwidth to s
by adamcharnock 5y ago
AFAIK, these telescopes produce a lot of data. Do we send this data back to Earth, or keep it on the moon and work on it remotely? Do we have the bandwidth to send it back to Earth? I’m really interested to know how much bandwidth can be achieved with an Earth-Moon link.
- markbnine 5y agoLROC, which may be the closest we have in volume to a lunar telescope, sends its data back to Earth. http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/about http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/about LROC is one of seven instruments on board LRO. Together, these instruments have a downlink allocation of 310 Gbits per Ka band pass and up to 4 passes per day. That translates into 155 GBytes per day of data or 56,575 GBytes per year (55 TBytes). These data are processed by each respective instrument's Science Operation Center (SOC) with the final products being delivered to the NASA Planetary Data System (PDS).
- adamcharnock 5y agoThat’s a great answer, thank you. And that’s actually a lot more link capacity than I expected. For anyone reading, Google states that the aka band is between 26.5 GHz and 40 GHz.
- mciancia 5y agoIf someone wonders, 155GB per day is 14.35Mb/s on average
- mzkply 5y agoI'll assume Starlink will be deployed around the moon if this telescope ever makes it past the proposal stage.