Episode 087

Very loose episode this week as we welcome Mark back and return to more of the old banter and rants!!

How slack – 1 news story taken from the pages of the internet press.  oh well, more next week…..

Sending SMS costs four times more than receiving data from Hubble – Mobility – iTnews Australia
Sending SMS costs four times more than receiving data from Hubble  A UK space scientist has claimed that sending a text message is at least four times more expensive than receiving scientific data from space..

Dr Bannister.

"The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only seven bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 10 cents.

"There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that's one million/140 = 7,490 text messages to transmit one megabyte.

"At 10 cents each that's $776.50 per megabyte, or about 4.4 times more expensive than the 'most pessimistic' estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs."

Dr Bannister was informed by Nasa that it costs $18.30 per megabyte for the transmission of data from Hubble to the Earth.

"This does not include the cost of the ground stations and the time of the personnel along the way, but it is an unambiguous number for that part of the process," he said.

"So that's $18.30 to get each megabyte from Hubble to the first point of contact on the ground, but no further.