100 Trillion
"Billions and Billions" was a phrase, fantastic at the time, that made Carl Sagan famous. At the time he was talking about the stars in the Milky Way, how many there were.
Next week, Mars Recon Orbiter, will be marking it's 4th anniversary orbiting Mars. It also has another milestone to celebrate: MRO has brought back more data to Earth from Mars... than *all* deep space missions combined. Not just missions to Mars, but all deep-space missions!
The ability to return data is crucial to the success of a mission - as is the quality of the data returned. A mass of data with no information to it is useless. In any case, MRO is able to relay data from other sources as well as it's own data.
To date, MRO has returned over 100 terabits so far, 100 trillion bits of data, from the Red Planet. Enough data to provide us a pretty through education about the wet past of Mars, it's cyclic nature, and where to keep looking for more interesting stuff on Mars.
Enough data to make a 35 hour long HD video! That's a lot of data...
Happy Anniversary to MRO and the entire team! Congratulations on reaching 100 Trillion Bits.


As an Engineering Specialist, it is Mike Deliman's responsibility to enable customers to achieve success in their endeavors, assist sales groups in evangelizing Wind River's technologies, and bring feedback of customer needs and experiences back into Marketing and Engineering. Mike has over 15 years of experience with VxWorks. 



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