London, UK (AHN) - London, UK (AHN) - A British space scientist has found that it is much more costly to send a message by cell phone than to transmit data from the Hubble space telescope to Earth.

Dr. Nigel Bannister from the University of Leicester in England calculated that one megabyte of SMS texting costs $730.63 to transmit based on U.K. rates. Hubble transmissions cost between $17.27 to $165 per megabyte based on NASA data.

One megabyte of SMS consists of 7,490 text messages each containing 160 characters.

Bannister used the calculation for the UK's Channel 4 Dispatches program entitled "The Mobile Phone Rip-Off."

"Hubble is by no means a cheap mission - but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical!" Cellular-news.com quoted Bannister as saying.