Memory Buffers?
Hi
I am a scientist, but have no idea about astrophysics and have a question I was hoping someone could help with.
In short, I am doing a breakdown of how science is portrayed in video games, and there is a scene in one game involving astrophysical research at a radio telescope. The short story is this:
A group of astrophysicists have been collecting data on geomagnetic events/aurora for years, but then the power went out, and "There goes years of post-doc data". They then start talking about getting the power back so that they can extract their data from the memory buffers.
First, while I assume astroresearch captures a ton of data, surely any experienced scientist has multiple copies of their data? Or is "memory buffer" something required in astrophysics due to the volume involved?
Second, in order to extract their data from the memory buffer, they have to recalibrate their telescope and align it to... whatever coordinates in the sky. But... why would you need to do that to retrieve your data from a memory buffer? To me this second part sounds more like they are collecting scanning data, not retrieving stored data in a memory buffer?
Does any of this makes sense to anyone?