How Spirit Takes Pictures

Some Clown writes "MSNBC has a great article on the details of the camera system on the Mars Rover titled How Sprit makes great photos. Apparently the high resolution images are all done with a 1-megapixel camera. All the money is in the CCD and Lens. The hardcore digital photographers in the crowd will probably find the article to be only a teaser on the technical specs, but the rest of us in the unwashed masses should find it interesting."

Comments

Interesting, but..

[xankar]

High quality images are good for PR, but what I really want to know is how it extracts information from the environment, how this information is being used, and whether or not we found anything we didn't expect to find.

$400,000,000?

[poppageek]

I am not trying to be negative, I think what they are doing is great and long overdue. Can't wait till we have Rovers on other planets. But why did it cost $400 million? I've read about what Rover is and how it was built and what it does. I am sure it was expensive to build but $400 million? Does that include the cost of getting it there?

Re:$400,000,000?

[ad0gg]

Expensive compare to what? B-1 Bomber is 1.2 billion a piece, F22 is $122 million. Communication sattelites can range from $100 million and up. And the R&D costs can spread accross multiple units, rovers only had two units to spread across.

Re:$400,000,000?

[Bigfishbowl]

Well, look at it this way . . . if you break down the cost across the entire population of the US, that amounts to about $1.37 each (compared to the $97 billion = $297.95 each for Iraq). So for less then the price of a beer at a bar, I get to see Mars. Works for me.

Re:Pictures

[nucal]

Actually, it would be fantastic if all Spirit's pictures had a finger in the bottom corner!

Re:I was honestly surprised.

[Mod Me God]

It is interesting, but I suppose it is explained because this sort of tech has to be (physically) tested a couple+ years in advance (and 2 years is in the final test/construction phase already, initial planning was years before), so strapping the latest untested camera in to a planned and tested system would potentially introduce a weak point in the system. Yeah, pretty nifty, kinda shows the potential 'old' hardware has when used to its full potential.

Lens

[dgerman]

"NASA's Spirit Rover is providing a lesson to aspiring digital photographers: Spend your money on the lens, not the pixels."

Every good photographer will tell you the same. It still amazes me that people are willing to drop Can$.5k for a digital camera, but think you are nuts for spending the same money in a lens.

Too bad the digital cameras all come with Zooms. At the same price, a zoom lens will tend to be worse than a fixed lens. An old camera, the yashica t4 super won a great reputation for its superb fixed lens (35 mm Carl Zeiss).

I have one, and I love it. It takes the best pics I have ever seen in a P&S.

Re:I was honestly surprised.

[Fr33z0r]

I'd imagine it's more to do with radiation hardening, they could have, for a paltry sum, put a top-of the range con/prosumer camera up there and if it broke, no big deal, but it wouldn't survive outside the protection of Earth's atmosphere, the smaller alectronics would be fried by radiation from the sun in no time. Radiation hardening is great, but a difficult, complicated, "fiddly" procedure, so basically all the tech on the shuttles are a lot less advanced than the stuff we take for granted here on Earth. They wouldn't survive space if they weren't.

Re:I was honestly surprised.

[joggle]

As far as mission-critical micro-electronics (like CPUs or CCDs), bigger is better for radiation-resistance. That's why many spacecraft still use 286 - 486 chips because greater speed isn't needed, are cheaper to radiation-harden and are less complicated (harder to break) than new chips. In the case of CCDs, it is mentioned in the article that lenses need to be created with greater precision for high-resolution CCDs than lower resolution ones. I'm sure this wouldn't be a problem for NASA, so I would guess they went with the lower resolution CCD due to the larger size of each sensor and because it met the mission requirements. They don't mention this in the article, but the rover is very bandwidth-limited, so it wouldn't be possible to send back any more information than it already is anyways.

They mentioned that the design process of the Huble's CCDs at a resolution of 800 x 800 contributed to the current mass production of consumer CCD cameras, so I don't think they are afraid of pushing the envelope if it is needed to meet mission requirements.