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Comment by i-use-nixos-btw | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered the same thing. But my theory wasn’t bandwidth, it was power, cost and (perhaps) weight.

I had no idea that we still monitored these things from the ground.

The power/weight thing is largely solved thanks to cell phones.

But they probably can't just buy it from industry, it has to be custom made for the project, with some gov-heavy regulation no doubt.

But surely they could do far better than 1 megapixel.

Lots of space stuff is 10-20 years behind what we use on the ground because of radiation hardening. Both because volume is so low that radiation hardened electronics have a very slow update schedule, and because older technology is inherently more radiation tolerant (higher voltages, larger process nodes, etc).

The ISS has off-the-shelf notebooks, but apart from that the uptake of regular non-hardened hardware is relatively recent and quite slow. I think the Falcon 9 has a couple non-hardened systems, and of course Ingenuity has lots of regular off-the-shelf hardware. That was one of the big reasons the predicted lifespan of Ingenuity was so low, but software mitigations (like the ability to reboot mid-flight) have proven very effective.

So you take the miniaturization gains from cell phones, and then replace the size/weight by encasing it within a sphere of water to protect it.

You'll need a ton (well, probably several tons) of water.

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1336/what-thicknes...

^^ Interesting read on this very topic.

do you think the wavelengths used by phones are going to work through space and the atmosphere, are they focused on short length transmissions (higher freqs). The answer appears to be yes ;-)

wavelength is just a requirement for an antenna which doesn't need to be shielded. i wasn't specifically saying use COTS phone chipsets, but the fact that the miniaturization is now possible. however, the little helicopter on Mars running Snapdragon chip (irc?) shows that COTS is possible

The helicopter has a Snapdragon, and then IIRC one of the experiments on the rover has two Intel Atoms, plus using ethernet to talk to the cameras.

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