The data, up to 1.4TB/day raw compressed, is planned to be fully open, every observation is public as soon as it is processed with no embargo. You can just download it and start looking for Rama or Oumuamua or plan your exoplanetary real estate empire or make a really big sandbox game. I at least want somebody to make me a cool screen saver.
You could easily be the first person to see a galaxy.
I wonder how much space exploration could be financed by auctioning off naming rights.
> When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.
For some tasks, surveys in particular, field of view is critical. You would need many Hubble telescopes to do what Roman can do mapping everything out there.
"What really makes Roman stand out is that it is designed for wide-field imaging. The cameras on telescopes can often only detect objects in a very small patch of sky. If we use the size that the full moon appears in the sky as our guide, Hubble’s field of view is often smaller than that —meaning each picture it takes is of a patch of sky smaller than the full moon. Webb’s instruments often are even smaller than Hubble’s. Each picture taken by Roman, however, will be larger than the full moon, allowing it to survey more of the sky much faster than Hubble or Webb."
Hubble in certain circumstances can see narrow and far. If you express this as a cone, you can extrapolate a volume.
It might be very useful to have something that can search wide and maybe not as far; nearer Earth dangers perhaps. Express that as a wider cone and extrapolate volume.
Part of the story is everyone being shocked at being under budget and ahead of schedule. I don't know everything, but I think this is reasonably attributable to the fact that this is a retrofit of an obsolete spy satellite. The leftovers of the security sector will be the most advanced scientific space surveyor. I have to wonder what things would look like with different priorities.
This is true. The telescope is much more than just the primary mirror.
Roman has two science instruments, a wide-field imager (“WFI”) and a coronagraph (“CGI”) and they were both built by NASA for this purpose (optics, electronics, detectors, deformable mirrors).
The WFI optics includes filters and a prism and grism for spectroscopy, and of course the very large CCD arrays.
The coronagraph is a rather special tech demo and allows imaging of exoplanets (Jupiter-like) while blocking the light of the host star. (https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/coron...). It’s a precursor to HWO which is mentioned down-thread.
From what I can gather it is much more than just the primary mirror but the entire platform sans classified parts, which were replaced with NASA's optics and sensors.
Hubble was the result of an open competition between a variety of companies and technologies. But the winners were the people who built the KH-11 spy satellite, who could offer the cheapest and best proved options because of their experience with KEENAN.
Both KH-11 and Hubble had similar sized mirrors, but that wasn't because of design reuse, it was because that was the biggest primary mirror you could fit in the Space Shuttle cargo bay (1). In actual fact no KH-11 went into space on a Shuttle, but the plan up until the Challenger disaster had been for the STS to carry all US satellites into space, including the KH-11, which was designed around that cargo bay.
1: The space shuttle cargo bay was sized the way it was for NRO payloads, but it seems clear that the USAF wasn't thinking about KEEENAN when they requested that size- a design like that would be better if it was wider and didn't need to be nearly as long. My suspicion is, when NASA asked them what size they wanted for the bay, they took the last design they had- the just cancelled KH-10 Manned Orbiting Laboratory, and used that.
No, Hubble didn't reuse any components from spy satellites. However, the chosen mirror diameter was decided by the size of the mirrors being produced for the Keyhole programme, as it meant NASA would be able to reuse Perkin-Elmer's existing fabrication facility.
Adversity forces a scientific budget and for jobs to be created in related research areas. For some reason we don’t find it important to maintain that level of funding when there’s no adversity.
Musks company provides not only the most cost effective but also the most reliable access to space that is currently unparalleled by any other company.
We should thank the government for spending tax money efficiently.
You should blame the legacy aerospace companies whom purposely inflate contracts and take forever to do things for there being a lack of competition, not Musk.
As I see it Musk is lobbying the goverment to give him money to do useless stuff & expensive in space like land on the moon again - basically redirecting funds away from useful stuff like the James Webb Telescope for publicity stunts. Not any different from the legacy aerospace companies, who also lobbied like crazy, except on a bigger, dumber scale.
Starship isn't actually operational. I'll let you look at their plans for it and you can tell me if they involve doing things the goverment would pay for like landing on the moon and building space stations or not.
How is landing on the moon not a publicity stunt? What can the humans do that massively cheaper robots couldn't - besides take some awesome photos and bring back some more moon rocks?
Of course there have long been plans to go back to the moon because its a cool fun thing to do and whoever happens to be president would likely be well remembered for taking credit for it. That doesn't give it credibility as a useful endeavor.
> How is landing on the moon not a publicity stunt? What can the humans do that massively cheaper robots couldn't - besides take some awesome photos and bring back some more moon rocks?
Humans have intuition and curiosity, they can spot something quickly in the distance that looks peculiar, go to it and quickly inspect it.
I see. And how do you you know that elon, a notably close supporter of the president didn't have anything to do with the Artemis program? I notice that Chinese electric vehicles are essentially banned in the US, but probably that had nothing to do with Elon as well right? And what does it matter if Blue Origin also made money on the Artemis program?
Maybe other space companies would be under budget and on time if they weren't run by Nazi drug addicts. I'm not typing a name but everyone reading this knows who I am a talking about.
I'm really excited about observations we're about to see over the next decade. Bringing NGR online and combining with Rubin, Hubble, and JWST will give us imagery and hopefully new discoveries and understanding.
I had the fortune of letting some of my neighbors through a telescope for the first time for the partial lunar eclipse. I say fortune, because it is amazing to be a part of someone having that experience that never disappoints. Even if they've seen images from NASA/ESA, putting your eyeball directly to the 'scope is much more meaningful.
I will never understand why NASA doesn't build at least two copies of expensive space telescopes like this. One single launch failure and boom (literally), the entire project is a failure?
It wouldn't double the cost assuming they do it with even a modicum of efficiency and intelligence. And hey - assuming that the launch goes smoothly, you can get double the benefit
This video linked from the site is quite good at adding a sense of scale to the undertaking. I also love that Roman will be supported by Hubble and Webb.
I'm wondering what are the considerations for having multiple detectors instead of a single large one! Does anybody have an idea? is it just because it's easier?
The primary detector is the wide-field instrument, which, believe it or not, takes pictures with a wide field of view. The secondary detector is the coronagraph instrument, which uses a bunch of funky filters to block out the light from the star to see the halo around it.
Edit: These are the detectors, which are the cameras. There is only one mirror assembly (with two mirrors) that focuses light into these instruments.
P.S. I didn't post this at top level ... it was in response to a silly joke about the Romans which has since been flagged by dang ... apparently my comment was relocated to the top level but it's redundant here as this link was already given in the post (which I didn't see when I made this comment.)
Is this a joke or just a demonstration of ignorance? The name Obamacare was not given to it by Obama, but by opponents of the law. The Obama administration just leaned into it. Blame conservatives if the name bothers you, not Obama and his administration from the time.
did not know and it's horrific Roman started as a billion dollar spy satellite sitting in a warehouse unused, but okay we got the crumbs from $20 Trillion in military spending I guess
oh and while the smallest planet Roman can image will be Jupiter-sized, Roman's successor would be able to image earth-like planets
except The Habitale Worlds Observatory Space Telescope HWO was scheduled for 2040 and now will not happen in my lifetime because DOGE got that one, Congress awarded it $150 Million and DOGE changed it to $5 Million
Is it really just a 1 minute launch window? That seems incredibly tight. If there's any hitch in the countdown, that would pretty much mean a scrubbed launch. Not being well versed in orbital mechanics, why would the window be so short?
Not unusual, and there are likely a number of contributing factors.
Falcon launches to the ISS typically have an instantaneous launch window (roughly, when the plane of the ISS's orbit sweeps over the launch site). If they miss it, they try again about a day later.
Falcon (both Heavy and its little sibling Falcon 9) uses subcooled densified propellants which limit how long it can sit waiting for launch while fueled before the LOX warms and expands too much.
A short window means they only have to compute and verify and program one trajectory.
Based on that, I guess the one upside would be that you have the window available every day as the L1/L2 positions never move relatively. Unlike a launch to Mars or other solar system body where you definitely want everything to be lined up efficiently.
It is important to point out, since you did not note the timezone with that quote, that the launch is actually scheduled for NET 07:26am EDT or 11:26:00 UTC.
You can get live countdowns and updates at https://www.spacex.com/launches which will link to first-party livestream coverage during the launch.
No need to go through third-party and advertising-laden dot-com sites.
The Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are intolerant to countdown holds late in the sequence. In particular, after propellant has been loaded, there must be no delay in launch. Any countdown holds will necessarily turn into a scrub for the day, as the propellant must be completely unloaded and the process restarted to prepare for launch. With the instantaneous window, it'll either be "go/no-go" at 07:26am EDT, or they'll go-around to another opportunity on Monday morning, around 07:22am.
The timezone has no bearing on the the one minute wide window. This was not posted as an advertisement of launch time. I provided the link the info was taken. If you click on it, it shows you the localized time. Not really sure why you feel like this was the important part of the question.
Is it really 500 Mbps of data headed to Earth 24x7? I'd be very interested to see any available public info about the earth station infrastructure being set up for that.
> but Musk still needs to send it out of orbit without explosions, so here's hoping
The Falcon Heavy has made 12 launches and all of them have been successful. It's built using the same engines as the Falcon 9, which has become the boringly reliable workhorse of space launch, and the rocket cores are very similar in design. I'd bet on a successful launch, and probably on a successful landing of the side boosters.
(Do we really need to politicize launch vehicles, of all things?)
> except The Habitale Worlds Observatory Space Telescope HWO was scheduled for 2040 and now will not happen in my lifetime because DOGE got that one, Congress awarded it $150 Million and DOGE changed it to $5 Million
I was so excited for this. It was the one thing I really wanted to see happen in my own lifetime.
The NASA budget was $5M as a placeholder, but Noel Hinners cut it to zero to light a fire under the community, instead of a bogus pretend-its-still-happening number.
"mbps" is a meaningless abbreviation. You need to consistently and correctly use capital letters when communicating technical terms. You cannot "e e cummings" your way into effective writing.
500 megabits per second works out to 5.4 terabytes per day. No idea where you get 1.5, unless you were thinking of 500Mb/hour!
The GP is alluding to the fact that the prefix "m" means milli-, not mega-. But that's pointless pedantry. Nobody would ever think that you meant 0.5 bits per second, and bit isn't a SI unit anyway.
No, your cable modem would be 1.08 terabytes per day.
Does it stop making sense when your calculations for the Roman telescope indicate slower speeds than your connection, which you say is 1/5th the speed?
Now, since the Roman telescope will be at an L2 point, signal acquisition will always be subject to the Earth's rotation. So there will be multiple ground stations involved across the globe.
If the quoted rate by NASA of 1.5 terabytes per day is accurate, then it will not be downlinking 24/7, but in bursts. 500Mbps is also the max, where the actual range will be 250-500. We'll need to account for RFI and packet loss, etc.
That's great! The US is the best tech innovation country in the world with the best curiosity and the sharpest people. Everyone else just tries to copy.
The data, up to 1.4TB/day raw compressed, is planned to be fully open, every observation is public as soon as it is processed with no embargo. You can just download it and start looking for Rama or Oumuamua or plan your exoplanetary real estate empire or make a really big sandbox game. I at least want somebody to make me a cool screen saver.
You could easily be the first person to see a galaxy.
I wonder how much space exploration could be financed by auctioning off naming rights.
> When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.
For some tasks, surveys in particular, field of view is critical. You would need many Hubble telescopes to do what Roman can do mapping everything out there.
"What really makes Roman stand out is that it is designed for wide-field imaging. The cameras on telescopes can often only detect objects in a very small patch of sky. If we use the size that the full moon appears in the sky as our guide, Hubble’s field of view is often smaller than that —meaning each picture it takes is of a patch of sky smaller than the full moon. Webb’s instruments often are even smaller than Hubble’s. Each picture taken by Roman, however, will be larger than the full moon, allowing it to survey more of the sky much faster than Hubble or Webb."
https://science.psu.edu/news/ask-expert-will-roman-help-reve...
And yet the narrow-field Hubble produced this famous image
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/science/universe-unc...
Those are galaxies. In a field of view "about 1/13th the diameter of the full Moon."
Your point being?
Hubble in certain circumstances can see narrow and far. If you express this as a cone, you can extrapolate a volume.
It might be very useful to have something that can search wide and maybe not as far; nearer Earth dangers perhaps. Express that as a wider cone and extrapolate volume.
I think their point is that it’s amazing.
Roman is scheduled to launch tomorrow (Aug 30) on a Falcon Heavy rocket:
https://www.space.com/news/live/nancy-grace-roman-telescope-...
Part of the story is everyone being shocked at being under budget and ahead of schedule. I don't know everything, but I think this is reasonably attributable to the fact that this is a retrofit of an obsolete spy satellite. The leftovers of the security sector will be the most advanced scientific space surveyor. I have to wonder what things would look like with different priorities.
IIRC the mirror is from a spy satellite, but the chassis and electronics are all NASA.
This is true. The telescope is much more than just the primary mirror.
Roman has two science instruments, a wide-field imager (“WFI”) and a coronagraph (“CGI”) and they were both built by NASA for this purpose (optics, electronics, detectors, deformable mirrors).
The WFI optics includes filters and a prism and grism for spectroscopy, and of course the very large CCD arrays.
The coronagraph is a rather special tech demo and allows imaging of exoplanets (Jupiter-like) while blocking the light of the host star. (https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/coron...). It’s a precursor to HWO which is mentioned down-thread.
From what I can gather it is much more than just the primary mirror but the entire platform sans classified parts, which were replaced with NASA's optics and sensors.
Isn't that also how Hubble started? I'd assume there's a lot of lessons learned to avoid costly research on conversion of the platform.
Hubble was the result of an open competition between a variety of companies and technologies. But the winners were the people who built the KH-11 spy satellite, who could offer the cheapest and best proved options because of their experience with KEENAN.
Both KH-11 and Hubble had similar sized mirrors, but that wasn't because of design reuse, it was because that was the biggest primary mirror you could fit in the Space Shuttle cargo bay (1). In actual fact no KH-11 went into space on a Shuttle, but the plan up until the Challenger disaster had been for the STS to carry all US satellites into space, including the KH-11, which was designed around that cargo bay.
1: The space shuttle cargo bay was sized the way it was for NRO payloads, but it seems clear that the USAF wasn't thinking about KEEENAN when they requested that size- a design like that would be better if it was wider and didn't need to be nearly as long. My suspicion is, when NASA asked them what size they wanted for the bay, they took the last design they had- the just cancelled KH-10 Manned Orbiting Laboratory, and used that.
No, Hubble didn't reuse any components from spy satellites. However, the chosen mirror diameter was decided by the size of the mirrors being produced for the Keyhole programme, as it meant NASA would be able to reuse Perkin-Elmer's existing fabrication facility.
> I have to wonder what things would look like with different priorities.
Things aren't as simple as more money = more good.
Rapid progress requires adversity, the kind you'll find when nations compete for military power, for example.
Adversity forces a scientific budget and for jobs to be created in related research areas. For some reason we don’t find it important to maintain that level of funding when there’s no adversity.
People shouldn't be shocked that employees of the US government can deliver things ahead of schedule and under budget.
The problems are that anyone gave Musk/doge the time of day and that we're too used to the president giving no bid contacts to incompetent donors.
Musks company provides not only the most cost effective but also the most reliable access to space that is currently unparalleled by any other company.
We should thank the government for spending tax money efficiently.
You should blame the legacy aerospace companies whom purposely inflate contracts and take forever to do things for there being a lack of competition, not Musk.
As I see it Musk is lobbying the goverment to give him money to do useless stuff & expensive in space like land on the moon again - basically redirecting funds away from useful stuff like the James Webb Telescope for publicity stunts. Not any different from the legacy aerospace companies, who also lobbied like crazy, except on a bigger, dumber scale.
Starship is mostly funded by Starlink.
Yes, Musk is a crappy character, but that's not a reason to make things up. This isn't Reddit.
Starship isn't actually operational. I'll let you look at their plans for it and you can tell me if they involve doing things the goverment would pay for like landing on the moon and building space stations or not.
Then you see it wrong. Plans for returning humans to the surface of the moon have been being developed for longer than you've known Musk's name.
The Artemis program was developed out of the Constellation program, which was initiated sometime around 2005 or 6.
How is landing on the moon not a publicity stunt? What can the humans do that massively cheaper robots couldn't - besides take some awesome photos and bring back some more moon rocks?
Of course there have long been plans to go back to the moon because its a cool fun thing to do and whoever happens to be president would likely be well remembered for taking credit for it. That doesn't give it credibility as a useful endeavor.
> How is landing on the moon not a publicity stunt? What can the humans do that massively cheaper robots couldn't - besides take some awesome photos and bring back some more moon rocks?
Humans have intuition and curiosity, they can spot something quickly in the distance that looks peculiar, go to it and quickly inspect it.
Even if it is a publicity stunt it was not lobbied by Elon Musk. Also Jeff Bezos Blue Origin got more money for the Artemis program.
I see. And how do you you know that elon, a notably close supporter of the president didn't have anything to do with the Artemis program? I notice that Chinese electric vehicles are essentially banned in the US, but probably that had nothing to do with Elon as well right? And what does it matter if Blue Origin also made money on the Artemis program?
No need to be so combative.
> the president giving no bid contacts to incompetent donors
Are you talking about SLS?
Oh maybe you'd say that is "Senate Launch System", it's complicated, job program, 50 states sharing, and so on?
Maybe other space companies would be under budget and on time if they weren't run by Nazi drug addicts. I'm not typing a name but everyone reading this knows who I am a talking about.
I'm really excited about observations we're about to see over the next decade. Bringing NGR online and combining with Rubin, Hubble, and JWST will give us imagery and hopefully new discoveries and understanding.
I had the fortune of letting some of my neighbors through a telescope for the first time for the partial lunar eclipse. I say fortune, because it is amazing to be a part of someone having that experience that never disappoints. Even if they've seen images from NASA/ESA, putting your eyeball directly to the 'scope is much more meaningful.
I will never understand why NASA doesn't build at least two copies of expensive space telescopes like this. One single launch failure and boom (literally), the entire project is a failure?
It wouldn't double the cost assuming they do it with even a modicum of efficiency and intelligence. And hey - assuming that the launch goes smoothly, you can get double the benefit
why build one when you can build two for twice the price?
I always thought this was a ridiculous part of the movie but it truly stuck with me more anything.
This video linked from the site is quite good at adding a sense of scale to the undertaking. I also love that Roman will be supported by Hubble and Webb.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDwemQH2zDU
I'm wondering what are the considerations for having multiple detectors instead of a single large one! Does anybody have an idea? is it just because it's easier?
The primary detector is the wide-field instrument, which, believe it or not, takes pictures with a wide field of view. The secondary detector is the coronagraph instrument, which uses a bunch of funky filters to block out the light from the star to see the halo around it.
Edit: These are the detectors, which are the cameras. There is only one mirror assembly (with two mirrors) that focuses light into these instruments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman
P.S. I didn't post this at top level ... it was in response to a silly joke about the Romans which has since been flagged by dang ... apparently my comment was relocated to the top level but it's redundant here as this link was already given in the post (which I didn't see when I made this comment.)
Oh, thank goodness. I greatly appreciate the link. I was confused and annoyed and now I’m happy.
Thankfully, it is not Nancy Ann Grace.
The telescope will be used to film sensationalist TV about missing kids
It watches the stars for evidence of guilt.
I was scared for a second that the current clown administration had named a space telescope after Nancy Grace the tv personality.
I suppose we should be grateful he didn’t force his own name at the last minute. I suppose he still has time.
Like Obamacare?
Very unlike Obamacare, which so far as I can make out was mostly a name given to the thing by its (and Obama's) opponents.
Is this a joke or just a demonstration of ignorance? The name Obamacare was not given to it by Obama, but by opponents of the law. The Obama administration just leaned into it. Blame conservatives if the name bothers you, not Obama and his administration from the time.
Tell me you don’t know anything about the ACA’s history without telling me you don’t know anything about the ACA’s history.
I'm still holding my breath on this one, will be most amazing telescope in my lifetime
parked in L2 a million miles away with 500mbps data transfer rate (1.5TB per DAY)
we've made it past DOGE destroying it
we've made it past him renaming it after himself and putting his mugshot on it
but Musk still needs to send it out of orbit without explosions, so here's hoping
(Falcon Heavy, don't tell me the odds)
* https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/details/6983/
* JWST vs Roman comparison https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14942/
* https://www.wired.com/story/nasas-nancy-grace-roman-space-te...
* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasas-roman-space...
* https://www.npr.org/2026/08/28/nx-s1-5905370/nasa-nancy-grac...
did not know and it's horrific Roman started as a billion dollar spy satellite sitting in a warehouse unused, but okay we got the crumbs from $20 Trillion in military spending I guess
oh and while the smallest planet Roman can image will be Jupiter-sized, Roman's successor would be able to image earth-like planets
except The Habitale Worlds Observatory Space Telescope HWO was scheduled for 2040 and now will not happen in my lifetime because DOGE got that one, Congress awarded it $150 Million and DOGE changed it to $5 Million
* https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/programs/habitable-wor...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitable_Worlds_Observatory
> * https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/details/6983/
06:25 AM Window Open
06:26 AM Window Close
Is it really just a 1 minute launch window? That seems incredibly tight. If there's any hitch in the countdown, that would pretty much mean a scrubbed launch. Not being well versed in orbital mechanics, why would the window be so short?
Not unusual, and there are likely a number of contributing factors.
Falcon launches to the ISS typically have an instantaneous launch window (roughly, when the plane of the ISS's orbit sweeps over the launch site). If they miss it, they try again about a day later.
Falcon (both Heavy and its little sibling Falcon 9) uses subcooled densified propellants which limit how long it can sit waiting for launch while fueled before the LOX warms and expands too much.
A short window means they only have to compute and verify and program one trajectory.
There's some discussion about a similar launch ~10 years ago (in that case going to L1) https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2vb5kv/1second_laun...
Based on that, I guess the one upside would be that you have the window available every day as the L1/L2 positions never move relatively. Unlike a launch to Mars or other solar system body where you definitely want everything to be lined up efficiently.
It is important to point out, since you did not note the timezone with that quote, that the launch is actually scheduled for NET 07:26am EDT or 11:26:00 UTC.
You can get live countdowns and updates at https://www.spacex.com/launches which will link to first-party livestream coverage during the launch.
No need to go through third-party and advertising-laden dot-com sites.
The Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are intolerant to countdown holds late in the sequence. In particular, after propellant has been loaded, there must be no delay in launch. Any countdown holds will necessarily turn into a scrub for the day, as the propellant must be completely unloaded and the process restarted to prepare for launch. With the instantaneous window, it'll either be "go/no-go" at 07:26am EDT, or they'll go-around to another opportunity on Monday morning, around 07:22am.
The timezone has no bearing on the the one minute wide window. This was not posted as an advertisement of launch time. I provided the link the info was taken. If you click on it, it shows you the localized time. Not really sure why you feel like this was the important part of the question.
Is it really 500 Mbps of data headed to Earth 24x7? I'd be very interested to see any available public info about the earth station infrastructure being set up for that.
> but Musk still needs to send it out of orbit without explosions, so here's hoping
The Falcon Heavy has made 12 launches and all of them have been successful. It's built using the same engines as the Falcon 9, which has become the boringly reliable workhorse of space launch, and the rocket cores are very similar in design. I'd bet on a successful launch, and probably on a successful landing of the side boosters.
(Do we really need to politicize launch vehicles, of all things?)
> except The Habitale Worlds Observatory Space Telescope HWO was scheduled for 2040 and now will not happen in my lifetime because DOGE got that one, Congress awarded it $150 Million and DOGE changed it to $5 Million
I was so excited for this. It was the one thing I really wanted to see happen in my own lifetime.
What a deeply moronic waste.
That's like Hubble funding cuts back in the '70s.
The NASA budget was $5M as a placeholder, but Noel Hinners cut it to zero to light a fire under the community, instead of a bogus pretend-its-still-happening number.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Quest_f...
yeah but we don't recover from this one like the 70s
the illegal Iran War costs over $120 BILLION, has used over 1000 Tomahawks at $4 Million each (and 1250 patriot missiles)
a BILLION was stolen from nuclear missile maintenance fund for QatarForceOne
another BILLION was stolen for all the DC renovations so far that no-one asked for
billion diverted to his fake "peace board"
so there is money for war and drapes and gold statues but not science that benefits the world
hell he spends $2 MILLION EVERY WEEKEND for GOLF, first term and this term, half billion before he is gone
we could have had people on Mars for all that (not even a project I support but still would be worthy science)
It is not 500mbps but 500Mbps. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/commu...
"mbps" is a meaningless abbreviation. You need to consistently and correctly use capital letters when communicating technical terms. You cannot "e e cummings" your way into effective writing.
500 megabits per second works out to 5.4 terabytes per day. No idea where you get 1.5, unless you were thinking of 500Mb/hour!
60 × 60 × 24 × 500 × 1000000 ÷ 8
my brain is not what it used to be due to long-covid so it's very possible I made a mistake
but 500 megabits per second to me is 500mbps?
ie. my cablemodem is 100mbps which is 100 megabits per second?
and that would [make Roman] 5.4 Terrabytes aka 5.4TB per day
but the transmitter is not at full speed full power 24/7
so it is 1.5TB per day in documentation that I do not have handy but vaguely remember
to repeat the more amazing part is that is from a MILLION MILES away, wow
(JWST "only" does 23mbps, 23 megabits per second)
The GP is alluding to the fact that the prefix "m" means milli-, not mega-. But that's pointless pedantry. Nobody would ever think that you meant 0.5 bits per second, and bit isn't a SI unit anyway.
No, your cable modem would be 1.08 terabytes per day.
Does it stop making sense when your calculations for the Roman telescope indicate slower speeds than your connection, which you say is 1/5th the speed?
Now, since the Roman telescope will be at an L2 point, signal acquisition will always be subject to the Earth's rotation. So there will be multiple ground stations involved across the globe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Deep_Space_Network
If the quoted rate by NASA of 1.5 terabytes per day is accurate, then it will not be downlinking 24/7, but in bursts. 500Mbps is also the max, where the actual range will be 250-500. We'll need to account for RFI and packet loss, etc.
unfortunate name
[flagged]
Please don't do this here.
That's great! The US is the best tech innovation country in the world with the best curiosity and the sharpest people. Everyone else just tries to copy.