"The download of six megabytes of data collected during the six-hour transit, from above Jupiter’s north pole to below its south pole, took one-and-a-half days."
...surely that's a typo and they mean gigabytes?
...surely that's a typo and they mean gigabytes?
Off topic, ish: does anyone know how large a solar panel array would have to be to supply all of our current energy use, if the array orbited the Sun at the same distance Mercury does?
It is all a matter of perspective.
Realistically, you'd at least double that, to produce the same power, as solar panels are <50% efficient.
Such a system could provide energy dense power to the entire solar system (skipping the steam turbine step for most locations, and going pure solar electric), up to large installations for entire planets, and down to individual spaceships.
I'm not suggesting we'll do it tomorrow. But within a hundred years, if we get and keep our shit together..?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Type.C2.A0II_c...
Googling suggests that global energy usage is estimated to be around 15 terawatts.
Using the most efficient multi-junction solar cells available - which can convert 30% of the light hitting them into electricity - we could generate that with about 6.5 million km² of solar panels: that's about 80% of Australia.
Out at Earth's orbit, it'd need to be 68 million km^2: about the area of the Indian Ocean.
I don't know any specifics around the Juno probe however most of the techniques usually sent 2-3x the amount of data actually downloaded because a missed frame was 1.5hrs(43mins @ Speed of light from Earth->Jupiter). Being able to reconstruct a frame with redundant data was critical.
Combined with a low power transmitter 6mb is pretty reasonable.
Seriously though, the current TCP/IP protocol is not designed to deal with that kind of distance.