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Comment by unclebucknasty | Hacker News Reader

I have to say this. I have been as amazed as anyone by the feat of engineering that this entire mission represents. It is absolutely mind-blowing and I have been sharing it with others, including my kids.

But, something puzzles me. That is, why didn't they use better camera technology? That's a lot of miles traveled and a lot of effort. Seems the mission would have been much better served by better imaging, both from a scientific perspective and from a public interest perspective (which can help engender support for future exploration).

Frankly, the fact that it even happened amazes me. But, the images disappoint me.

I know it sounds like a nit, given the overall accomplishment, but that's all the more reason to wonder why not ensure that something presumably as simple as the images we capture be as stunning as possible?

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The wifi reception is really shitty up there. Jest aside: More pixels, more bandwidth needed and if you think about how much bandwidth wifi systems were capable of achieving 10 years ago, they're probably at the edge of what they could use without resorting to cutting edge tech. You also have to transmit the data from the lander to the orbiter in a reasonably short timeframe since the lander is not always visible from the orbiter.

Maybe they have higher res pictures still on the orbiter that will download later when there's bandwith left.

Not only 10 years ago, but also "known reliable equipment" from 10 years ago. Cutting-edge technical equipment usually isn't sent up on these things due to the propensity for unknown bugs.

Yes, known reliable is what I meant. Or, more accurately, best reliable. Seems like we certainly had better 10 years ago.

Just really odd that this tremendous feat couldn't be paired with much better imaging tech. I mean, the imaging is strikingly poor and unimpressive compared to the rest of the mission.

Found the answer. Those who mentioned that it was state of the art for the time were correct.

The main camera, OSIRIS, is only 4 megapixels. Also, the camera cost $100MM, which is a significant percentage of the overall mission. So, it's not as if they were skimping.

Yeah, I think this mission was worthy of a cutting edge imaging solution though!

As far as transmission windows, well we had download-continuation browser solutions back then.

Seriously, not to say it's that simple, but this mission solved much harder problems than imaging would seem to pose.

Really would be interested in knowing how the imgaging solution selection process went and what the key drivers were.

Sure, they certainly have download-continuation deployed, but they also have a lot of data and a very narrow channel and time window - the lander had only battery for 68 hours most of the time the lander is not visible to the orbiter. The problem is not imaging. The lens is certainly magnitudes better than you can see on the pictures, but transmitting all those pixels back to earth is the real problem. TCP kinda gets hard if RTT is approximately one hour.

68 hours was the lander's initial battery life. The solar panels were to recharge the batteries, and the expected operation was up to 3 months. The expected hard stop is March 2015, when the comet's orbit will take it close enough to the sun that the tech is not expected to survive the heat.

Rosetta is also equipped with solar arrays.

None of the probes has ever used what could be called cutting edge equipment, the science behind it all is cutting edge but you can't put a camera, lenses or processors on a device going into outer space without having done some serious testing. It's just easier to do it with devices and such that have a long track record of working with radiation, incredible cold and so on.

I totally know where you're coming from though, having Curiosity or Rosetta be equipped with some serious photographical capabilities would've been awesome. But I doubt any of the firms are going to put any kind of cutting edge imaging solution on them any time soon.

I hear you, but it's hard to imagine we didn't have better, reliable tech at the time, including hardening for the environment. And, at a minimum, seems they could've developed the tech in concert, and still retained the lower quality camera as a backup.

>you can't put a camera, lenses or processors on a device going into outer space without having done some serious testing

old timers have been saying this for a very long time, and it took years to convince someone to JUST FUCKING SHOOT A PHONE UP THERE

http://www.space.com/21036-space-smartphones-photos-nasa-pho...

Shaun Meehan (almost 100 private satellites currently in orbit, all more or less smartphones in space) talks about this in the podcast: http://www.theamphour.com/220-an-interview-with-shaun-meehan...

Cutting edge is always buggy, full stop.

If you're sending millions of dollars worth of technology into space for 10 years, you want to be more than reasonably sure it will still work when it gets where it's going.

That is simply not something you can be reasonably sure of with "cutting edge" technology.

Well, I didn't literally mean cutting edge as in first one ever made. I just meant best reliable technology of the time, which 10 years ago was certainly much better than what we are seeing.

best reliable technology capable of withstanding 10 years in ~ absolute zero while being bombarded with radiation? I'm pretty sure they would still need technology that was "best reliable tech" many years before the launch (and had been tested in space).

I think you may be overestimating the complexity of hardening. It's something we do very well. Consider Hubble, manned missions, and also the probes that have journeyed much farther out than Earth's orbit. Hard to imagine that simply upping the image resolution would pose a major hurdle in that arena.

BTW, the solar panels upon which Rosetta relied to make the journey were pretty cutting edge. And Rosetta is the first mission to go beyond the asteroid belt relying only on solar power.

Had they failed, the entire mission would have failed.

More specifically, I should say underestimating our ability to harden.

Feel free to downvote this.

Bear in mind it left Earth more than 10 years ago, I'd imagine they did send state of the art tech for the time.

It might not quite have been state of the art; launch-contemporary technology probably wasn't also radiation-hardened.

It's because you need to send something that needs to work on very tight energy budgets, after 10 years of radiation exposure and extremely cold temperatures, and on tight bandwidth budgets. They're lifespans and conditions that are rarely considered when designing cutting edge tech.

If you only get one shot at setting up for a mission that won't start gathering data until 10 years later, you probably don't want to take a state of the art camera up there, you want to take a decent camera that you're pretty sure will work well after 10 years.

My guess would be latency, a higher quality camera feed would take longer to transmit.

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