Sports in space
Mark Newman of MLB.com has a interesting article about astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria and NASA working with MLBAM to get baseball audio to the astronauts while they conducting science experiments aboard the International Space Station. Few things I did’nt know:
MLB.com: Were there bandwidth issues with being able to actually watch a full game broadcast?
Lopez-Alegria: They can send a video, but they have to send it up in 500-megabite chunks, and that ends up being pretty restrictive. It’s probably about 25 minutes worth of video, so they (Houston flight command) would have to send up that many videos, and they wouldn’t be happy with that.
The stuff that we’re using in this (application) is pretty routine, just a file. We can actually get live video up — we watched the Super Bowl, believe it or not. That’s kind of a midget compared to the giant of what sort of information technology is out there these days. It’s phenomenal what you can do in broadcasting, especially in hi-def. We did the first HD link on that mission, so that we sent it live from up there and you could see it down here. We have great capability. Today’s digital technology is hard to keep up with.
(via DigiSpo by Joel Price)
