Sign in / up

back to article Endeavour crawls to Kennedy launch pad

Space shuttle Endeavour this morning complete its leisurely 3.4-mile journey from Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39A, ahead of its scheduled STS-134 mission launch on 19 April. The Endeavour crew. Pic: NASA NASA has provided the traditional cheery photo of the Endeavour crew, which shows …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. deshepherd

    365 days

    > NASA enthuses that the spectrometer will run "24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year"

    so that will be one day of downtime in the next 366 days then?

    1 0
  2. Trevor 3
    Coat

    or

    >>capturing data at a rate "equivalent to filling a 1 Gigabyte USB memory stick every second!"

    Or filling a 120GB WD Raptor every 2 mins?

    Or filing a 64GB ipod every 1:04 minutes?

    Or filling a 250GB Hard Drive in the time it takes to microwave last nights pizza?

    1 0
    1. Paul Powell
      Reply Icon

      Or maybe, just maybe

      What the hell is wrong with 1 Gigabyte per second?

      it's like saying that a car was travelling at a speed equivalent to a cycling 100 miles in an hour

      2 0
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Troll

      because as any fule no...

      usb sticks labelled 1GB are too small to hold 1GB of data.

      1 0
  3. Ray Simard

    A side note...

    Cmdr. Kelly is the husband of Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who took a bullet through the brain fired by Jared Loughner in a failed assassination attempt that took 6 lives and injured another 13 on Jan. 8.

    Giffords is making a remarkable recovery and is expected to be present for the launch of Endeavour.

    3 0
    1. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Pint

      Good news indeed

      I will drink to that!

      1 0
  4. Dom 3

    What are they doing with all that data?

    They haven't got an 8gbit/sec downlink, have they?

    1 0
    1. defiler
      Reply Icon

      Of course they have

      Fibre Channel - just a *really* long fibre...

      1 0
      1. MrT
        Reply Icon
        Thumb Up

        @ just a *really* long fibre...

        Cool - support it with a carbon monofilament/Buckminsterfullerene strap, push ISS out to geostationary orbit using the ion drive and install the space elevator - no need for shuttles to resupply, which is a good job because that's a tad further than they could reach even if they weren't retiring.

        Next: NASA to replace Space Shuttle with ACC's Space Elevator. Just have to wait until Kalidasa's Temple** is connected up by BT Infinity.**

        ** Timescale? Well, the Temple is in a very rural area, with not many people around to upvote the local exchange, and consequently the clue is in the product name...

        1 0
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Coat

      "To the CLOUD!!!"

      Pressurised coat please :-D

      3 0
      1. No. Really!?
        Reply Icon
        Boffin

        To the «Oort» cloud!

        ... to be sure

        1 0
    3. starbaby
      Reply Icon

      all those usb sticks

      I think the plan is to fill soyuz capsules with 1 GB USB sticks, why else would they use that metric?

      I wonder what kind of bandwidth the s-band antennas going up in the same shipment get?

      0 0
  5. Levente Szileszky
    Pint

    AMS is a pretty amazing project...

    ...that started pretty long time ago, in the mid-90s. They had flown the first prototype AMS-01 onboard STS-91 (the very Discovery just retired two days ago) in 1998 if I remember the date correctly from my friend and fellow Hungarian, Sandor Blasko, who was a developer on the power supply side of things (control application, reporting software/client etc). Though I haven't heard of him for years now ("ping Sanyi -t") I'm following the news about AMS ever since he spent almost a year down in KSC in Florida in 1998 (I'm sure he's still working on this project); FWIW just found out his old photos are still online: http://mrc.mht.bme.hu/hg5crs/KSC/ and http://mrc.mht.bme.hu/hg5crs/JSC/

    Beer because it's good times...

    0 0
  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re: What are they doing with all that data?

    They didn't say they were storing it all, just that they were capturing it at 1GB/s - I'm guessing 90% or more of it will be junk and thrown away as soon as it is captured.

    1 0
  7. Number6

    DNA

    Having just read elsewhere that a sperm stores the equivalent of 37.5MB of data in its DNA, which comes to about 1.5TB of data per ejaculation. So that's about 21000 data bursts per year.

    1 0
This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like