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Comment by yegle | Hacker News Reader

"The video signal took 101 seconds to reach Earth, sent at the system’s maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second (Mbps)."

Based on some quick search, this is comparable to US median broadband download speed.

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I think this also means that the the capacity of the empty space in 3.4GB. Someone has previously pointed out the interesting networking/caching(/storage?) implications for such long transmission time.

This idea is covered during the first part of one of my favorite Tom7 videos.

If this comment is the first you are hearing of Tom7... strap in and enjoy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio

Indeed, you could use that empty space as delay line memory. That's some wicked latency, though.

Kind of amazing the article doesn't contain the word latency a single time.

It's good they're improving throughput/bandwidth but it doesn't help the big problem which is the latency.

There's a hard physical limit (speed of light) on latency that we can't do anything about. Higher bandwidth deep space communication gives us the ability to recover more science data from robotic missions, so it's worth working on.

I mean the latency problem is definitely not solvable, so why would they be trying to work on it?

They actually improved the data transfer latency considerably. An earlier version of the DSOC ground receiver was designed to dump data to a hard drive that would then be trucked over to Pasadena. Some joked that more bits might be lost on the I-210 freeway than between the asteroid belt and Earth.

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