This is simply incredible

A 13-inch-long tube, called a Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier, is making it possible for scientists to receive massive amounts of images and data from the orbiter at an unusually fast rate. It is the first high data rate K-band transmitter to fly on a NASA spacecraft.

With this new amplifier, LRO can transmit 461 gigabytes of data per day. That’s more information than you can find in a four-story library. And it transmits this information at a rate of up to 100 megabytes per second.

100 mega-BYTES per second, from the moon. My home internet connection struggles to give me 1MB/sec. I don’t want to think about the ~3000ms ping times though…

More information from NASA.