The time that is somewhat delayed from real time (happening at the moment). ‘Near real time’ data is a designation of spacecraft data transmitted to ground stations a short time after its collection (normally a few hours). Other spacecraft data may be marked as ‘real time’, such as engineering data sent immediately from on-board computers. The absence of ‘near real time’ and ‘real time’ labels means that the scientific data has been stored on the spacecraft's tapes and transmitted at a later date.