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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

If I had to guess - and I do, because I don't work for NASA - it's because there's a limited payload space on board, and visible images are some of the least interesting things, science-wise, that you can ask from Mars. Combine this with the electronics-unfriendly environment, and you probably aren't going to be strapping huge DLSR's on a 2.5 billion dollar science machine.

Edit: Also, these appear to be the navigation cameras, so they're probably just good enough to be able to point the rover in a direction free of road hazards and tell it to boldly go where no other machine has yet gotten around to going.

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I doubt that is the reason, the weight of a 16mp sensor or marginally more than a 2mp one. The metal camera supports are much likely to dwarf the sensor weight differences.

most of a DSLR's weight is lens and battery(s), both of which are not issues in this case, since the lens would be the same and the power comes from a nuclear battery.

NASA couldn't just bolt on a 5DmkIII and expect it to work because the electronics would be fried.

That said, the Apollo missions took a not-very-modified Hasselblad camera with them that worked fine, which is why we have much higher resolution pictures of the moon, despite it being decades ago.

> That said, the Apollo missions took a not-very-modified Hasselblad camera with them that worked fine, which is why we have much higher resolution pictures of the moon, despite it being decades ago.

That and the fact that they used sneakernet, which is still much higher bandwidth than wireless, especially in space.

Also, it was easier to do on a sound stage.

While I'm guessing this is in jest. All of these hardening necessary raises a lot of question about the legitimacy of the older photos.

My child.

In the past years, while your mother played in the sunlight and your father smiled at girls and drank cool drafts as the evening drew in, before you were even a glimmer or a sunbeam, we had devices called "film cameras".

These "film cameras" did not have electronic components. They worked by using levers, springs and wheels. An emulsion that is reactive to light was prepared and pasted onto a plastic film. The plastic film was exposed to the light, but briefly. Later a complicated process was applied to transfer the reacted image (for that is what it was) onto other media, which could then be copied.

If one looks upon The Sacred Ebay (all bless the name of Sacred Ebay) one will find similar devices today.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Leica-111a-Camera-No-276160-1938-/...

In this way, the dark time became but light.

Ahhhwaahhhh wooooo. Ahhhwahh wooo...

(THIS IS IN JEST)

I thought that one of the things that led to the discovery of radiation was an accidental exposure of photographic film by x-rays.

Yay, yay and verily. Forsooth though it is time to rely on sciencey things.

http://ston.jsc.nasa.gov/collections/TRS/_techrep/CR188427.p...

Wherein the effects of radiation on films is documented. The answer is that some damage occurs, but films are fogged only by extreme conditions such as those that STS-31 got hit by. I don't know what steps were taken by apollo to protect films, but I would not be surprised if some protection was used to prevent excessive damage.

Also I would point out that Apollo missions were 8 days in length while the martian missions are 9 mths long (if they smash into Mars at 13k kmph) or hopefully 24 mths + long if they work - hence the serious need for hardening.

Anyway - if you like don't believe in it all - the rest of us are happy looking at the photos, data and science and enjoying the general idea. You can believe in invisible pink unicorns or ghosts or something instead if you like! (we don't mind)

Not at all, the hardening is for electronic components, the Hasselblad camera is all mechanical. The astronauts would have had to store the film in lead lined containers, but they had the advantage of bring the films back with them. Curiosity has to rely in electronics to get the images back to earth because it's staying there.

You also have to factor in that the camera needs to withstand take-off, deep space flight for months (hello radiation!), 11g's on re-entry, heat of re-entry and landing. Along with lasting for at least 2 years on Mars with no spare parts in sub-zero temperatures.

There's a reason why they don't send the latest and greatest camera or computer technology into space.

> most of a DSLR's weight is lens and battery(s), both of which are not issues in this case, since the lens would be the same

Only true if you assume the same sensor area for the 2MP sensor and the 16MP sensor, which is a poor assumption. If they did use sensors with the same area you would pay dearly with high noise and low sensitivity just to cram more pixels in there. I think most photographers figured out awhile ago that the "Megapixel War" is only meaningful as a way to pitch perceived quality to uninformed consumers.

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