The data, up to 1.4TB/day raw compressed, is planned to be fully open, every observation is public as soon as it is processed with no embargo. You can just download it and start looking for Rama or Oumuamua or plan your exoplanetary real estate empire or make a really big sandbox game. I at least want somebody to make me a cool screen saver.
You could easily be the first person to see a galaxy.
I wonder how much space exploration could be financed by auctioning off naming rights.
> every observation is public as soon as it is processed with no embargo
That's a big deal. Do you have any source for that? (I couldn't find it in the ones you linked). This is great for humanity as a whole, but... poor grad students who now need to rush to publish their papers even sooner.
Thank you! From talking to a contact working with JWST, it sounds a bit trickier in practice. The data are public, but with Roman the idea is that you must process them on their computers rather than download everything locally, and you pay for the compute/storage you use.
If their platform allows any kind of processing as it sounds then anyone could just dump the data. So I don't see why they would not allow downloads for local processing.
Reading between the lines, I assume they aren't reasonably capable of serving up ~TB scale data to hundreds (thousands? more?) of separate clients per day. The usual fix for this would be something like an AWS requester pays bucket.
To your question specifically, in such a scenario they would charge an obscene amount for the bandwidth so you would be strongly incentivized not to download hundreds of GB of data from them.
The questions is, how much are you willing to pay (because the cost of this is not free, especially in this cloud era), and what is the scientific return for access to the uncalibrated data? There is significantly more value in a well designed pipeline for everyone (which is where anyone who would work on the pipeline would slot in) than bespoke pipelines which are poorly built and unmaintainable.
> When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.
> I wonder how much space exploration could be financed by auctioning off naming rights.
My favorite part about this is that since names are largely a social construct, given the right situation, we could just nullify all the paid names and start again.
Sure, whoever does this will lose a lot of credibility. But say a disliked president signs an order forcing his country to stop accepting names that were paid, it only takes nobody reinstating it. And the rest of the world also giving up on the names, of course.
So you can totally fund space exploration this way, and then society can decide that it sucked and nullify it after the buyer is dead and unable to protest. I guess the family could, but...
The Coronagraph Instrument (CGI) flight software is a surprisingly massive at over 100,000 source lines of C++ code, which is significantly larger than typical JPL payloads. It is running on a a LEON4 (SPARC) processor on a radiation-hardened Frontgrade Gaisler GR740 board, using Wind River's VxWorks.
You could easily be the first person to see a galaxy.
I wonder how much space exploration could be financed by auctioning off naming rights.