Can't speak for S-band, but Ku-band data rates are 25 Mbps Earth-to-ISS and 300 Mbps ISS-to-Earth, which is the maximum supported by TDRSS Ku-band links. Data rates may drop a bit depending on the individual satellite involved, configuration, etc.
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Pretty much - call that antenna gain, it's much cheaper to put bigger and better hardware on the ground. Recall though that the signal still goes through a TDRSS satellite, which also has a bigger dish.
unrelated to the ISS but might be interesting to some people http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
The fact that we can talk to something 15 billion km away is mind-blowing.
It makes light (at 1 billion km per hour) seem slow.
Re:A Laser Message from Space
by toomuchtodo on Monday June 23, 2014 @12:16PM
(#7932737)
More mindblowing? I, Joe Sixpack, can see the current Deep Space Network status overview (your URL) from my bedroom whilst in my underwear. Science!
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedi... Seems like the last time it happened and it was big news. I can't imagine how scary it would be to be in space without any way to communicate with earth. I guess the crew return vehicle would still be usable and the station would still operate as normal for a good while, but it would still be very scary.
Here are some links to the live status of those systems:
http://spacestationlive.nasa.gov/displays/cronusDisplay2.htm... UHF
http://spacestationlive.nasa.gov/displays/cronusDisplay3.htm... S-band
http://spacestationlive.nasa.gov/displays/cronusDisplay4.htm... Ku-band
Click "Show Table" in the bottom right corner of that page to see the raw data for each display.
It would be nice to see some data-rate stats on those connections. Also a better dashboard would be fun to build for the ISS, some interesting data points are available.
Also apparently the high-speed Ku-band is available about 50% of the time. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18pik4/i_am_astronaut_...