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5 tweets,
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1/ I talked to Don Sousa, the person in charge of shipping and handling hundreds of computer disk drives to and from the telescopes that captured that wild photo of the black hole theatlantic.com/science/archiv…
2/ Why disk drives? Well, the telescopes collected five petabytes of data. The average iPhone has 64 gigabytes of data storage. There are 1 million gigabytes in one petabyte. It would have taken years for all that data to cross the internet
3/ Don is a computer support specialist @MITHaystack, but he's best known as the shipping guy. He's responsible for packaging and sending equipment to space observatories all around the world, and he's really good at it
4/ “I’ve shipped to every continent,” he says, and in his 32 years on the job, he hasn’t lost a single package. Well, there *was* one, and it's a crazy story, and you're going to have to read the piece to find out
5/ Anyway, it's pretty wild that we owe a groundbreaking picture of a black hole in a galaxy 55 million light-years away to a bunch of disk drives shipped through plain old FedEx
