Nasa’s amazing new £8 billion telescope has less memory onboard than an iPhone

Posted on : July 18, 2022

Following its launch in December, NASA's £8 billion ($10bn) James Webb Space Telescope is already beaming some hugely impressive photos back to Earth.

But what's even more impressive is the kit it uses to do so.

According to IEEE Spectrum, the pricey telescope only has 68GB of storage space, which is about the same memory size as Apple's cheapest iPhone (64GB).

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This is roughly enough storage space to hang onto one day's worth of photographs, or in the case of an iPhone, a couple of apps and video files.

NASA reportedly chose the small storage drive because of how difficult it is to take photographs in space.

The telescope is situated around a million miles away from Earth where it has to contend with deadly space radiation and very slow Internet speeds.

What's more, NASA expects this storage space to shrink even further after 10 years due to wear and tear.

By comparison, a top-notch iPhone 13 Pro comes with 1TB of storage, or about 15 times the size of the telescope's hard drive.

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Last week NASA revealed the first images to be sent back to Earth from the James Webb telescope.

The US space agency shared the sharpest-ever image of 13 billion-year-old galaxies ever taken.

US President Joe Biden said at the time: “These images are going to remind the world that America can do big things, and they’ll remind the American people, especially our children, that there’s nothing beyond our capacity – nothing beyond our capacity."

“We can see possibilities no one has ever seen before, and we can go places no one has ever gone before."

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