Comment by areoform | Hacker News Reader

Comment by areoform | Hacker News Reader

There are some people saying that the onboard cameras are very bad and badly positioned. While the imagery is breathtaking to me, it's just a tiny taste of what's yet to come — most of the images/videos haven't been downlinked yet.

Orion is the most media consumption focused craft that NASA has ever sent out. There are 16 cameras on the mission, ranging from,

    — 7 COTS GoPro Hero 4 Black derived cameras that shoot video in, 4k/30fps, 1080p/120fps, 720p/240fps. 4 of these are mounted on tips of the solar panel. Most of the pictures that you are seeing are from these cameras.

    - Cameras around the service module and the Orion capsule that are (mostly, AFAICT) wired cameras derived from PixeLINK PL-D725, these shoot in color and B&W, and record at 75fps on a single channel.

    - 3 internal Cameras that are a part of Callisto a Lockheed Martin thing.

On the ground, we've gotten used to fairly high bandwidth communications system, but Orion is using NASA's Deep Space Network. There just isn't enough bandwidth to downlink the kind of pristine imagery that people want.

We'll have to wait until the capsule comes back home to watch all of the 4k video that this machine is capturing.

We have come a long way though, when the Apollo missions were going on, all they had were grainy TV broadcasts. They had to wait for weeks to get those gorgeous images out.

> On the ground,

On the ground we've also gotten used to soft lighting conditions. Light in space works pretty differently from that on ground. On Earth we have more diffuse lighting as the light of the sun gets spread out from the atmosphere. There are many (MANY) surfaces for light to bounce off of and reflect from, making a more full looking light. In space, on the other hand, light is more often like a point light source. Your background is (effectively) the blackest of blacks. Your foreground is extremely bright. Cameras have pretty limited dynamic ranges. This also contributes to the blurryness you see and why the shadows look "off" (there's actually conspiracy theories around shadows on the moon because of this misunderstanding).

So even after we get all that 4k video things will still be "off" but like areoform is saying, we've come an incredibly long ways. I for one am excited for all these images. But also don't expect them to look like what you're used to on Earth. (and take this message as a warning for incoming conspiracies)

> when the Apollo missions were going on, all they had were grainy TV broadcasts

This reminds me of a not-so-fun fact where the original Apollo 11 data tapes were presumed saved elsewhere and were likely erased and recorded over. [0] The video that still remains from "one small step" is essentially a recording of a recording. Since the 10 FPS raw feed wasn't compatible with the TV broadcast standards at the time, they essentially pointed a normal TV camera at a TV displaying the source feed.

However, some better quality broadcast recorded tapes were found, restored, and released in 2009. [1]

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/not-unsolved-mysteries-the-lost...

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/apollo11_hdpage.html

Wait, a GoPro works in vacuum in space? Even one derived from that? That's pretty cool. What did they do to it to make it work in such a crazy environment?

NASA has plenty of vacuum chambers that they can control the pressure and temperature. They even tested the entire JWST hardware in a massive vacuum chamber.

heck I have a vacuum chamber on my desk at home, though not one as good as the NASA ones

Here is the entire Orion spacecraft being put in one NASA's vacuum chambers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G99L5RRjEKA

It seems likely that a lot of industrial grade hardware would work just fine in space, needing at most minor tweaks, especially for operating periods of weeks/months at most. Government contracting is just too used to the old model of burning billions on redesigning everything (because, of course, jobs). They've only barely gotten over that model for rocketry in general.

For instance, the footage on Perseverance's landing was also all from off-the-shelf hardware. The Ingenuity helicopter is also largely off-the-shelf gear, it uses a plain old Snapdragon 801 as its main processor running Linux. Perseverance also uses an Intel Atom processor (although it carries 2) to receive footage from all the cameras and compress them, compared to the main processor, which is an ancient PowerPC chip. IIRC there was also a cubesat which used a smartphone as its processor and several others which have used Raspberry Pis. A GoPro has also been to space earlier this year.

SpaceX actually has used them on a bunch of Falcon 9 launches. But I'd worry about how well a GoPro would survive in the long run in the harsh radiation environment outside the Van Allen belts.

Space is inhospitable for humans, but not so bad for tech. With no need for a cushy room-temperature, you mostly need to think about increased radiation and temperature swings.

I can't find details on NASA's designs, but I suspect you'd mostly need a new casing. Something radiation-tolerant (most plastic degrades quickly) and maybe radiation-shielding if it messes with the electronics too much. For temperature you could just run it through a few cycles on Earth and see what breaks. Probably nothing, given the GoPro's lack of moving parts and general ruggedness.

The rugged, icy, salt-water environments the GoPro is designed for are, in many ways, a lot more demanding than space.

My GoPro won't work if it's too cold (lithium battery).

They're using GoPro 4's, which is somewhat interesting, as the 11 just came out. So, old tech (8 years old or so) that's been heavily modified to work in space. I'm reminded some janky PowerPC powers the FORTRAN code that runs the Hubble.

It is romantic to think that the Earthrise photo was taken with a Hasselblad medium format camera.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kovAmQ0jz4

All space hardware is old since it has to be radiation-proof and proven reliable above all else.

It seems unlikely that the GoPros in question are rad-hard (there is no rad-hard GoPro that I'm aware of); it's more likely that they chose them for some other reason (perhaps some sort of validation or testing), or that these have fewer heat dissipation issues than the newer models. Heat dissipation is a frequent cause of issues for electronics in space.

They are old because the design was locked long before launch.

If they found new cameras with better heat dissipation, they would still go with old ones, otherwise they would have to recertify the new ones, which would take ages.

It's sort of fun to think, since in the Apollo missions, this certainly wasn't the case.

To add to that - vacuum can also mess up sealed components that were manufactured at 1ATM. This is mostly a problem with electrolytic batteries and capacitors which puff up when the atmospheric pressure is removed. For batteries mitigations include manufacturing at low pressures or constraining the expansion mechanically.

Pretty sure a GoPro underwater housing would be perfectly capable of maintaining 1ATM in space. They are designed to handle many times that in external pressure.

The 1atm in space is pushing in the opposite direction. But yeah, if it's good to 5atm in pressure odds are it's good to 1atm in vacuum

The main issue is radiation from the sun and I guess the rest of space. This paper will give you a very nice idea of all the issues with COTS in space: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2...

>COTS GoPro Hero 4 Black derived cameras

and they didnt overheat? Inconceivable!

NASA has all that money and they can’t even get cameras that shoot at 4K@60p?

Thanks for the information. Very helpful.

My conspiracy side thinks NASA wants the opportunity to review the high resolution photos and video before they are revealed to the public.

They have to paint out by hand the wires that enable the astronauts to walk like they're in low gravity. This takes time.

Automation is their friend. Just "hot pink" those wires and batch the process =P

Okay, boss, this LTX-71 concealable mike is part of the same system that NASA used when they faked the Apollo Moon landings. They had the astronauts broadcast around the world from a sound stage at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernadino, California. So it worked for them, shouldn't give us too many problems.

That's not true. Everyone knows that Coppola forced them to shoot on-site.

Coppola: If I'm going to make a fake moon landing video it's going to be the best damn one ever created. We're shooting on site, and that's final!

I believe someone did the math and supposedly showed that it would have been cheaper to actually land on the moon than fake it with what they had available at the time.

It used to be Kubrick

To be fair, NASA _is_ probably reviewing the high res imagery before releasing it, but for a much more mundane reason than any conspiracy theory. A lot of contractors worked on Orion. NASA is responsible for not accidentally leaking any trade secrets that may be visible in imagery.

If the fundamental delay to NASA releasing images is leak of proprietary data, that is a pretty good argument against the continued existence of NASA as a public agency.

Why? Public Agencies work with private parties and individuals all the time. This brings constraints on what they can do with information.

There is an enormous spectrum between "we cannot release some proprietary data from COTS components" and "we cannot release images without approval from our vendors".

(Not that I am convinced that this is the real reason why NASA is not releasing images quickly.)

Waiting for approval from vendors is a big difference from NASA reviewing the photos themselves, which was the original claim

I would find such a delay unacceptable for a public agency. Anything visible in the photos should be releasable.

"That's no moon. That's the set Stanley Kubrick built to film the fake moon landings."

No conspiracy or funniness to be had. ITAR is the main limiting factor to releasing images/videos at this point. Next is the download rate and the high res images are not high priority since operations can be run using lower resolution. We all need to remember mission success is the highest priority. We will get the good stuff we want, just not immediately.

>ITAR is the main limiting factor to releasing images/videos at this point.

Pictures of the moon fall under ITAR?

Gotta edit out the decepticons.

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