March 28, 2024

News Collective

Complete New Zealand News World

James Webb owns a "dwarf" hard disk, but your device certainly can't resist cosmic radiation

James Webb owns a “dwarf” hard disk, but your device certainly can’t resist cosmic radiation

James Webb has already started amaze us with the first universe pictures caught, but we also continue to discover amazing technical curiosities. Especially in the case of the project after years of development and investment of nearly $10,000 million.

SSD disk “elf” at James Webb. After capturing the images with the sensors and instruments, James Webb stores them in the unit called Solid State Recorder, a very special volume that is surprising due to its limited capacity of 68GB.

This is not an SSD like you. The number seems ridiculous considering that any laptop today Usually it has a 256 GB drive. But of course, there are very important differences with SSD units for those computers, especially since the unit provided in James Webb must pass important efficiency, speed, and redundancy tests, but there’s still more.

cosmic radiation for me. To withstand the harsh conditions of that open space in which it is located, the hard drive of James Webb Space Telescope It was designed to withstand the cosmic radiation that would have destroyed it. It’s possible that the device on your laptop is fried without this kind of special protection.

Why 68 GB? James Webb can produce up to 57 GB of data in the form of images each day, while Hubble produces between 1 and 2 GB of data. At NASA they had all calculatedand raised a slightly higher margin to 68 GB because according to their estimation, the degradation of the storage will reduce the available capacity by about 10 GB after 10 years.

See also  Fruit that improves the immune system against respiratory diseases - Enseñame de Ciencia

The disc is constantly emptying. In addition, you did not have to have a much larger disk, since the collected data (3% of the capacity is reserved for engineering and telemetry data) is sent to Earth through the 25.9 GHz channel – other channels are also used to upload and download data Additional — that allows that data to be transferred Speed ​​28 Mbps.

This makes James Webb connect to Earth for about four hours a day to download data every day, and each of those daily sessions releases 28.6GB of data. So the unit never stops emptying and packing it up: those pictures didn’t have to be saved in James Webb.

Remember DVD. Another curiosity: all communication channels use a protocol Reid-Solomon error correction, which is a very popular system that, for example, is also used on DVD, Blu-ray and even QR codes. Added to this protocol is another protocol for confirming receipt: until James Webb receives confirmation that the file has been correctly received, he does not delete it from his storage.