Roman's ground stations took a downlink of 1.4 terabytes a day
NASA confirmed that ground stations in New Mexico, Australia and Japan have received data from the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The downlink carries 500 megabits every second, roughly 1.4 terabytes over a day. The first data carry the telescope's temperatures, power draw and preliminary image information. Science operations are to start early in 2027.
Science··Morning
About 1.4 terabytes a day are coming down
NASA confirmed that ground stations in New Mexico, Australia and Japan have received data from the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The downlink carries 500 megabits every second; over a whole day that adds up to roughly 1.4 terabytes. The telescope will operate roughly 1 million miles away from Earth, and the data come down over a radio link from that distance. Roman is a NASA space telescope designed to survey wide areas of the sky. That rate is about 62 megabytes a second.[1]
Three stations on three continents
The stations are the New Mexico site of NASA's Near Space Network, the European Space Agency's New Norcia antenna in Australia and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Misasa station. Spread across three countries, the stations can see the telescope in turn as the Earth rotates. New Norcia lies in western Australia, and Misasa in western Japan.[1]
The first data describe the telescope's health
Bob Kalogerakos of the Goddard Space Flight Center said the downlink carries instrument temperatures, power draw and preliminary image information. So these are not yet science observations but data on how the telescope is working. NASA aims to start science operations at the beginning of 2027. Instrument temperature and power draw are the basic measures of whether the telescope's systems are working as expected.[1]
