Our colleagues at Tom’s {Hardware} (opens in new tab) seen one thing fascinating: the James Webb House Telescope (JWST), a alternative for the Hubble array used to take HD photos of the farthest reaches of area, has a fully puny arduous drive—68 gigabytes. What offers?!
I feel this will get at some fascinating questions on what makes pc {hardware} “highly effective” or, extra precisely, well-suited to its job. The JWST, which has been pumping out some unbelievable photos (opens in new tab), is outfitted with a “Stable State Recorder” that shops the array’s collected information earlier than transmitting it right down to Earth. The JWST is constructed to gather round 57GB of knowledge every day, transmitting half the quota at a time throughout two orbital home windows within the Earth’s rotation. The telescope itself has no substantial long-term storage as a result of it does not want it—that information does not do anybody any good floating in area.
To resist the ambient hazards of open area, the JWST’s arduous drive has been “radiation-hardened,” and it has about 10 gigs of storage greater than it wants for day by day operation—intentional redundancy to make sure it retains useful capability because it degrades over its deliberate 10-year lifespan.
In the end, I at all times discover it considerably profound to see the identical fundamental {hardware} and ideas at play in shopper {hardware} utilized to essentially the most superior and cutting-edge human endeavors. It is like seeing a blue display of demise on a billboard and being reminded it is only a supersized pc, however as an alternative of a bit of wry chuckle you get a rush on the considered humanity’s potential.
It is also a reminder that every one the uncooked computing energy on the earth—teraflops, gigabytes, issues of that nature—is meaningless if not used successfully. My beefy desktop has virtually as a lot RAM because the JWST has storage, however often crashes beneath the burden of Chrome. I discover a number of the most fascinating tales in computing come from doing essentially the most with much less, and whereas the JWST’s SSD couldn’t match Warzone and even Future 2 for that matter, it’s exactly the fitting instrument for its job.
