![]() The onboard storage is enough to collect data for about 24 hours before it runs out of room. Data gathered from its scientific instruments, once collected, is stored within the spacecraft’s 68-GB solid-state drive (3 percent is reserved for engineering and telemetry data).Īlex Hunter, also a flight systems engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, says that by the end of JWST’s 10-year mission life, they expect to be down to about 60 GB because of deep-space radiation and wear and tear. The other is the 2.27-GHz, 40-kb/s downlink over which the telescope transmits engineering data-including its operational status, systems health, and other information concerning the telescope’s day-to-day activities.Īny scientific data the JWST collects during its lifetime will need to be stored on board, because the spacecraft doesn’t maintain round-the-clock contact with Earth. ![]() One is the 2.09-GHz uplink that ferries future transmission and scientific observation schedules to the telescope at 16 kilobits per second. In addition, according to Carl Hansen, a flight systems engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (the science operations center for JWST), a comparable X-band antenna would be so large that the spacecraft would have trouble remaining steady for imaging.Ī-band frequency is the telescope’s workhorse communication channel, it also employs two channels in the S-band. A high data rate is a necessity for the scientific work JWST will be undertaking. And I wanted to make sure that we didn’t get any new risks,” he says.Ī-band frequencies can transmit more data than X-band (7 to 11.2 GHz) or S-band (2 to 4 GHz), common choices for craft in deep space. “I knew where the risks were in this mission. He became the mission systems engineer in 2004. Menzel says he first saw the frequency selection proposals for JWST around 2000, when he was working at Compared to Hubble, which is still active and generates 1 to 2 gigabytes of data daily, JWST can produce up to 57 GB each day (although that amount is dependent on what observations are scheduled). IEEE Spectrumīoth the data-collection and transmission rates of JWST dwarf those of the older JWST is one of three craft currently occupying L2 (Shown here at an exaggerated distance from Earth). The Lagrange points are equilibrium locations where competing gravitational tugs on an object net out to zero. The K a-band is a portion of the broader K-band (another portion, the Ku-band, was also considered). Specifically, JWST is transmitting data back to Earth on a 25.9-gigahertz channel at up to 28 megabits per second. According to Menzel, who has worked on JWST in some capacity for over 20 years, the plan has always been to use well-understood KĪ-band frequencies for the bulky transmissions of scientific data. ![]()
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