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Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Considering how much camera sensors have improved in the last few years I wonder how outdated these sensors are (or not)

Edit: makes me also wonder if with all the delays they upgrade any equipment in the meantime.

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Hard to tell, since you can't use off-the-shelf sensors. They have to withstand the harsh environment in space, for a very long time, without any maintenance.

They're also specifically designed to operate in absurdly low temperatures — one in fact requires temperatures under 7 Kelvin and so in addition to the sun shield there's a mechanical cooler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRI_(Mid-Infrared_Instrument)

"Only" about 10 years. This has a very complicated orbit and needs to use fuel to adjust and stay on it.

I was working on an in space assembly project at NASA recently although it was in a research department so we were not concerned about using space rated equipment. We were exploring both traditional methods and reinforcement learning. The cameras we were using were 2048x2048 and I asked around about what we could expect to have available if it went to space and I think the best off the shelf space rated camera was about 720p so anything more would need to be custom.

> makes me also wonder if with all the delays they upgrade any equipment in the meantime.

This is how you never launch the damn thing. There is just no way to "upgrade any equipment" without introducing a tremendous amount of paperwork, additional testing, etc.

I seem to remember the detector arrays for MIRI were built sometime between 2005 and 2009. (I worked on MIRI for a time in 2011)

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