Dr Nigel Bannister a scientist from University of Leicester has concluded after several researches that text messaging is four time more expensive than receiving scientific data from outer space. He said: “The bottom line is texting is at least 4 times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that.

He was able to obtain a megabyte of data from Hubble, and then he compared that price with the 5p cost of sending a text.

“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 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that’s £374.49 per MB – or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.”

He contacted Nasa to give an estimate of how much does cost to receive data from space, they responded by saying that it cost around £8.85 per megabyte (MB) for the transmission of data from HST to the Earth.

They have also said “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 to get each MB 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.”

Source: University of Leicester