Comment by JamesTRexx
6 hours ago
"Makes it so clear what it is."
Well.., I've been more busy with writing code lately so that the first question coming to mind was, how many bytes is an array of one square kilometer? And I assume it's a two-dimensional array.
I'm thinking that you'd need to print out the array to be able to properly measure this. So we'd need to decide on the print itself. Do we use A4 paper, old school green bar? What size font is used? We'd also need to decide on the contents of each element in the array. Let's say they are floats with a set limit of precision. So an A4 is 210mm x 297mm. 1km / 210mm = 4761.9 1km/297mm = 3367.0. If we go with 4bytes per float, that's 4761.9 * 3367.0 * 4 = 64,133,269.2 bytes => 61.16 MB
It's also before coffee, so my logic might not be right for basic math yet
It's a radio telescope, how would you imagine translating that to bytes?
Here's an article mentioning the data transmission rates in SKA, up to 20 terabits per second:
https://www.skao.int/en/explore/big-data
Are you deliberately obtuse to the play on words of an array being used from a programmer's use of the word in contrast to an array of antennas?
Every sensor in the array is sampling at frequency, so - first order - you can use that sampling frequency and the sample size, you get an idea of the input bandwidth in bytes/second. There are of course bandwidth reduction steps (filtering, downsampling, beamforming)...
This makes no sense though? Given the Nyquist theorem, simply increasing sampling frequency past a certain step doesn't change the outcome.
Aren't they sampling broadband for later processing?
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