14 DAY TRIAL // You think SMS is cheap? Check this out. According to University of Leicester space scientist Dr Nigel Bannister, sending a message via SMS is more expensive than downloading data on the Hubble Space Telescope. To be more exact, it's about four times more expensive to send a text message - which by the way costs only 5 pennies - than downloading one megabyte of scientific information on NASA's Hubble Telescope. What a rip-off!
"The bottom line is that texting is at least 4 times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that", said Dr Bannister. "The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5 pennies. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that's 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5 pennies each, that's 372,49 sterling pounds per megabyte - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the 'most pessimistic' estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs."
Because he didn't know exactly how much NASA is paying for each downloaded megabyte from the Hubble Space Telescope, Dr Bannister called the US space agency and found out that the price for a downloaded megabyte is about 8.85 sterling pounds. This price may vary to up to 85 sterling pounds and it would still be at least four times cheaper than one megabyte of data relayed via SMS.
"This doesn't include the cost of the ground stations and the time of the personnel along the way, but it is an unambiguous number for that part of the process. So that's 8.85 sterling pounds to get each megabyte from Hubble, to the first point of contact on the ground, but no further. Hence we need to go a little bit further to estimate exactly how much it costs to transmit data from Hubble to the end user - i.e. to the data archive which scientists can access. This is difficult, so I had to make some conservative assumptions", said Dr Bannister.
"Hubble is by no means a cheap mission - but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical!", he concluded.