Resource Tom’s Hardware noticed one interesting thing. The largest and most advanced space telescope to date, the James Webb Space Telescope, which is supposed to replace the Hubble, has a very small hard drive – 68 GB. And this despite the fact that it is used to capture images of the farthest corners of space in high resolution. For obvious reasons, this raises questions for many, because such a volume is not even enough for any modern game.
James Webb is equipped with a solid-state recorder (SSR) that stores the data arrays collected by the telescope before they are sent to Earth. Engineers were so conceived that the daily amount of data does not exceed 57 GB. At a time, the telescope can transmit half (28.6 GB) during two four-hour orbital windows as the Earth rotates. The telescope itself does not have a large long-term storage, because it does not actually need it – no data is stored there.
In order to withstand the effects of outer space, the drive is protected from cosmic rays, and an additional 10 GB is required for it to work correctly on a daily basis. This is necessary to ensure that the functional capacity is maintained as it wears out over its entire service life (10 years).
If you think about it, all those teraflops and the like are meaningless when they’re not being used. A typical computer has almost as much RAM as a James Webb telescope. At the same time, the observatory performs important tasks in space, and the computer may crash under the load of the Chrome browser. By the way, the Hubble telescope has even less internal memory – 2 GB.
Source: Trash Box
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