• FauxLiving@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    In Earth orbit, there would be little latency. Starlink operates at ~500km and latency on that network is around 50ms. ‘Traditional’ internet satellites are in geosync orbit which is around 35,000 km, their latency is in the 250ms range.

    At TLI (Translunar Injection) burn they were at 185km. They would have been a bit higher when the problem happened but their apogee was 2,600km, so they were somewhere in the 50-100ms range

    They use the TDRS for data, it has a capacity of around 800Mbps but that is shared with the ISS.

    So, their Internet connection is probably better than people using cellular data or Starlink. At the moon it’ll be in the 2500ms range.

    They’re testing an optical system that would allow for much higher bandwidth, in the 100s of Gbps. The hardware that they’re carrying will only do about 250Mbps but there are optical tricks they can do to increase that significantly once they confirm the base system works.