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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

The limit seems to be not the cameras, but the downlink.

You can trade off resolution for time, though. Surely high resolution photos would be useful for some purposes, even if it means you only get a few of them in a day.

Seems like even that would come at the cost of other data that may be more critical (sensors, telemetry, etc).

But if the network is as a whole pushing full capacity, spreading out the load won't help because there's barely any slack to spread it into. You could get 4x resolution, but you'll only get 1/4th the amount of footage.

Let's face it, we don't really need 24fps+ footage from the moon. Nothing is changing on a timescale that would be interesting. Even if the cameras are on a rover, take high quality panoramic 360 stereoscopic images every time the rover moves to a new destination. During the course of the next move, it can be uploading that data.

But who are we kidding? A group of internet forum nerds coming up with something that the people at NASA/JPL/ESA/etc haven't already considered?

> Let's face it, we don't really need 24fps+ footage from the moon. Nothing is changing on a timescale that would be interesting.

NASA's funding problems would compound if they took an attitude this naïve during what is largely a PR mission.

I'm naive? What do you expect to see? Just take a still and apply some noise to it, and it'll look "just like" video. I don't know what you're on about, but there's no people in these images. If these were manned landings with expeditions, then great, let's have some video. But that's not what we're talking about. And you know this

There are plans to send people back to the moon.

I think they're pushing for funding to upgrade the bandwidth. More channels, more data we can get at once.

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