Our colleagues at Tom’s {Hardware} (opens in new tab) observed one thing fascinating: the James Webb Area Telescope (JWST), a alternative for the Hubble array used to take HD footage of the farthest reaches of area, has a fully puny laborious drive—68 gigabytes. What provides?!
I feel this will get at some fascinating questions on what makes laptop {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 all the way down to Earth. The JWST is constructed to gather round 57GB of information 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 would not want it—that information would not do anybody any good floating in area.
To face up to the ambient hazards of open area, the JWST’s laborious 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 purposeful capability because it degrades over its deliberate 10-year lifespan.
Finally, I at all times discover it considerably profound to see the identical fundamental {hardware} and ideas at play in shopper {hardware} utilized to probably the most superior and cutting-edge human endeavors. It is like seeing a blue display of loss of life on a billboard and being reminded it is only a supersized laptop, however as an alternative of slightly 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 nearly as a lot RAM because the JWST has storage, however frequently crashes beneath the load of Chrome. I discover a number of the most fascinating tales in computing come from doing probably 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 correct software for its job.
