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Comment by kaliqt | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't make sense. Even if the speed is low right now, I don't see why you'd gimp the hardware. You can take higher res pictures and transfer them over longer periods of time.

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A big problem with computing in space is the radiation environment. To be quite frank, it's absurdly hostile. IIRC the voyagers have very little computing power (so, few things that can malfunction) and even then they run three processors that are already radiation-hardened, and each computation is run in parallel on each processor, and the outcomes are compared among the three to detect and throw away any computations that were altered by radiation-based bit flips.

Such is space. Everything needs to be designed specially for it, especially for trips beyond LEO (where the magnetosphere is still providing you significant protection).

You might run out of local disk space while waiting for whatever is there to transfer. Assuming you are continuing to take more pictures/videos and want to save them until they can be transferred.

I think disk space is cheap as well.

Radiation hard electronics are not.

And you don't have to send everything high quality. But at least some shiny pictures would be nice.

I don't buy that when you can buy 32gb of storage on a card the size of your pinkie nail for under $10.

You're forgetting just how inhospitable space is to consumer grade electronics. If you watch non-live videos from the space station or check out some of their pictures you'll see loads of dead or stuck pixels on the cameras. That's from radiation damaging the components and those are essentially still completely protected by Earth's magnetic field. As you venture beyond LEO the situation gets much worse and an unlucky hit could kill your $10 storage ending your $74 million dollar Moon mission.

I'm not, I assume anything like that will need to be wrapped in sheets of lead. But modern storage densities are so high there's no need to run out.

Lead wrapping thick enough to sufficiently protect against radiation damage is very, very heavy. Beyond LEO, excessive weight is still ridiculously expensive.

My point being that it's the hardening that's expensive, not the storage itself. I don't think you need that much lead to shield increasingly tiny storage media.

That card would be dead (non responsive or short circuited) by the time it made it to Mars. Rough rule of thumb I have heard is add 2 zeros to the cost of every IC for space grade stuff.

Sure but what does it cost for 32gb of space rated, radiation hardened memory?

Maybe even in triplicate for a consensus system!

I've got a quote in front of me right now for a ~1 TB data recorder for just shy of $4 million.

Also keep in mind this isn't even for the highest class parts, this is more in line for something like a NASA Explorers program level [0]. Something you would get for a JWST or an Artemis level of program would be even more $$$

https://explorers.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.html

And how reliable will that storage be when it is bombarded with all of the radiation out atmosphere is currently shielding it from

Chandrayaan-3's life expectancy is 2 weeks. You could probably say the same thing about every aspect.

Hardware has to withstand the elements, including the radiation. On Earth we have the atmosphere to absorb a substantial amount compared to on Mars and the Moon.

While in the article said "8k video", I suspect he meant 8k live streaming. Which means right now or lose it forever. You can do hybrid if you want. Local cache on hardware that records on 8k, and streams live to 1k, so bandwidth is not exceeded.

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