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I'm sure it's a very complicated problem, but I would have expected a 5 year old rover to have a better camera.

I am a bit shocked at the potatoness of it.

Hayabusa2 carries multiple science payloads for remote sensing, sampling, and four small rovers that will investigate the asteroid surface by hopping and then on top of all that it will bring back samples in 2020!

All of that for less than $150 million! From a research data point of view, even having a color camera was overkill. Reminds me of Carl Sagan having to convince NASA to take the pale blue dot picture since it doesn’t have any significant value in the field of astronomy.

> since it doesn’t have any significant value in the field of astronomy.

PR has some value: more people will want to try and join the field and more funding could be secured.

NASA is not allowed PR as a federal agency. Imagine how far ads, sponsoring games/events, etc, would get NASA in terms of PR. Compare that to the military:

https://www.cheatsheet.com/money-career/amount-money-militar...

https://taskandpurpose.com/us-military-combat-trainer-kick-a...

Not only that, NASA's education department was as close to PR as we had and...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/05/25/trum...

On the other hand, I visited several of the major ESA facilities across Europe, and then Kennedy Space Center, and it was a stark difference how much more commercialized KSC is. It’s a proper theme park. I don’t think any other space agency has anything so touristy.

The visitor complex is a separate entity than the KSC itself. It's run by Delaware North.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_Space_Center_Visitor_C...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_North

On the flip side, Brindenstine has discussed selling ad space on the sides of rockets and naming rights to missions. One concern (out of many) is ensuring that the money goes to NASA, and not just the treasury's general fund

That's completely false. NASA has a very large PR (public affairs) team, 114 employees in 2016. NASA also spends about ~4 million a year with external advertising and PR agencies.

https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-17-711?source=ra

Also, the NASA budget ended up getting a big increase, and the education budget was not cut:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/planetary-science-wi...

I'm pretty sure it's not a poor camera because they couldn't afford it. It'll be because of weight considerations. If you have a higher resolution camera, everything has to be bigger and heavier - larger camera, more local storage, more processing power, bigger antenna (these have to be sent using lossless compression for science), etc. Each robot has a mass of 1.1 kg, lighter than my laptop - and it has to do other science and return a sample to earth!

And the things only weigh 2 pounds. All added weight has to count on these.

I suspect that too, but am looking for data to support this. We have tiny miracles in our cell phones today, are they really any heavier than what's on that vehicle? (I understand a cell phone camera isn't Space Ready™.) Does it require, perhaps, additional hardware that wouldn't be needed otherwise with today's on-board solution? And what's up with the severe lens distortion?

Cool topic I hope to dig into a bit to get those answers.

A few factors I can think of:

The rovers launched in 2014, and they were designed well before that. I wouldn't be surprised if the camera hardware was decided on in 2010

A normal camera in space is going to have problems. I'm not any sort of camera expert, but I can imagine there's a _lot_ of electronics in one. There's the sensor. That sensor may be hooked up to an analog to digital converter, which might be hooked up to a processor that converts whatever the sensor reads into a compressed image. Someone who is familiar with how cameras work can probably think of a dozen bits I'm missing :)

All of those bits of silicon are going to get bombarded with radiation, so they need to be radiation hardened. Smaller transistors are especially susceptible to radiation, so your radiation hardened chips are going to be bigger, more power hungry, and generally not as good as more up to date ones. From looking around online, it looks like the best rad-hard cameras today are only a couple megapixels.

I'm not sure about this case, but often times cameras not a priority for a mission. They're great for generating PR and excitement, but in terms of scientific value there's lots of other instruments that may have higher priority (both in terms of the design, and in terms of available bandwidth for returning data). If the cameras are just there to make sure the rover doesn't crash into something, they're probably using a wide angle lens which helps with navigation but can cause distortions.

Also not an expert on the topic but here are some examples of space-ready cameras with pictures and specs: http://www.msss.com/space-cameras/

Obviously radiation, extreme temperatures, vibration, and vacuum are at least some of the problems. They explicitly state that lens have no moving parts, I’m not sure why that is an issue and how can they focus without moving parts - maybe they’re just permanently focused on infinity and hence close objects are blurrier?

Lens distortion might be just normal with uncorrected very wide angle lens which you want to make framing/steering easier. Otherwise you might need a separate camera just to help you aim the first one.

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