EHT Flew Five Petabytes Airborne

To compose the first black hole image released in 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope team had to wrangle about 5 petabytes of recordings, enough to weigh more than half a ton in hard drive modules. They needed to move those drives to correlator centers in western Massachusetts and Bonn, Germany, so they literally put them on airplanes because shipping petabytes beat any practical internet transfer. Flying about 700 terabytes over roughly 14 hours works out to an effective transfer rate of about 14 gigabytes per second.

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