The telescope James Webb has only been at full capacity for a few weeks and he is already leaving us all speechless with his stunning photographs. Many of us might think that to process all the information it collects, tens of available terabytes are needed, but nothing is further from the truth: The telescope has amodesto” HDD of only 68 GB of storage.
were you wondering where did the telescope keep the incredible snapshots it has been taking all this time? Well, there you have the answer, as revealed IEE Spectrumneither more nor less than a SSD disk that probably it is smaller than the one you have installed on your home computer.
Ok, but as you may have imagined, it is not a common hard drive. In space, far from the natural shield offered by the magnetic field of our planetthe electronic elements are continually bombarded by solar particles. So the hard drive has been specifically designed not to end up fried by radiation.. And if these conditions do not seem harsh enough to you, keep in mind that you have to deal with extremely low temperatures, just 50 degrees below dabsolute zero (at about –188º Celsius).
And won’t its 68GB of storage quickly fall short? Well, although it seems little, it does not seem that it will be like that. Only 3% of that storage is reserved for engineering and telemetry data necessary for the correct operation of the telescope, while the rest is information that is stored and transmit in the direction of the earth on the same day. So the disk is continually filling and emptying.
CuriouslyNASA estimates that after about 10 years, will only be available 60 GB of storage due to continuous exposure to radiation, so it remains to be seen if this it does not become a problem that can end up shortening the life of the telescope.
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[Via:[Vía:Engadget]