What’s Taters, precious?
Damn, beat me to it
Bit annoying that they’re more specific about latency than bandwidth. The laser had lower latency than broadband, but I want to know if the laser had enough bandwidth to stream the video.
This latest milestone comes after “first light” was achieved on Nov. 14. Since then, the system has demonstrated faster data downlink speeds and increased pointing accuracy during its weekly checkouts. On the night of Dec. 4, the project demonstrated downlink bit rates of 62.5 Mbps, 100 Mbps, and 267 Mbps, which is comparable to broadband internet download speeds. The team was able to download a total of 1.3 terabits of data during that time. As a comparison, NASA’s Magellan mission to Venus downlinked 1.2 terabits during its entire mission from 1990 to 1994.
Honestly the 1.2 TB I’m the early 90s is an insanely impressive figure to me. I mean in that era a gigabyte seemed like an obscene amount of data, the interat ran at less than 56 kbps, and I don’t think I had a 1GB drive in my hime PC until almost the turn of the millennium. Sending and storing that much from venus is a huge accomplishment.
1.2 Tb* ~ 150GB
Still impressive though
They probably stored it on tape which was slow but could hold an impressive amount of data.
I remember my first multi gig hard drive. I was blown away that I could fully install Diablo 2, Fallout 2, and a cracked version of 3d Studio Max at the same time. No more changing disks!
Lower latency than broadband…?
If you’re getting >100s ping times you might want to have them come out to check your lines.
What strikes me is not the bandwidth achieved but the precision of the technology to aim the laser. 19 million miles is a great distance to successfully aim a beam of light. As this technology develops, real time communications with objects in orbit like around Mars will be possible.
Well realtime is just not true. But cool technology nonetheless.
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It’s really not at these scales. Earth and Mars go from roughly 4 light minutes apart to over 20.
At the best case, saying something and then waiting 8 minutes for a response is hardly what I’d call “real time”.
Speed of light is insanely slow at the cosmic scale.
It’s the fastest speed information can go through space, as far as we know. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of space. And a mean a LOT.
I’m wondering if we will need to tweak our Internet protocols to include interplanetary time? I would imagine mirroring would be much more important. Because light can only go so fast.
Yes, the high latency and intermittent connectivity is a big challenge. Delay tolerant networking (DTN) is one good way of solving this problem.
I think the issue, again will be date and time.
DDMMYYYY + Planet + Orbit?
UTC and forget
I’m sure several OSI layers have already been modified by NASA to suit their needs. But, the protocols will pretty much remain standard.
I presume that we’re not yet concerned with what the Ansible tech awoke in the vast emptiness between, hmm?
Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections
That guy must be a Spectrum subscriber
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This is the correct use of technology. (But later let’s test the ping on Doom over laserlan)
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Taters is very precious!!
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This tracks
Taters, star surfer
“What’s Taters?”
“Po-ta-toes… Boil um mash um stick um in a stew!”
That is cute. But why a cat?
Because cute
Right. I guess I kinda agree.
Joke answer: It’s cute.
Real answer: It’s cute and because of that broad appeal it’s easy good PR. NASA has to appeal to the populace to hope they demand their Representatives properly fund them.
Taters should have his own wikipedia page. First outer space cat video.
Everything’s fun and games until the Kilrathi discover this and its point of origin.
