Because of this, my guess is that the camera technology that we can safely get to Mars is significantly worse than what we expect in our day-to-day lives.
http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/thinkpad-laptop-nasa-youtube-...
But as I'm developing software for my Universitie's cubesat, it's incredibly interesting to read all that goes into Single Event Upsets and other hardware failures from being outside of Earth's protective atmosphere.
These projects started out 10-15 years ago. So upgrading them mid-stream is almost impossible.
They're stuck with the hardware available when they chose that part. Re-designing for new hardware means changing everything.
For silicon devices, the VERY hard rad environment of inter-planetary space is pretty much instadeath. So you are forced to be 'dumb'. You can shield it, but that adds weight and heat issues. Redundancy is out, it just doubles/triples the weight, heat, and interfacing issues. You can use rad-hardened devices (best idea) but then you have to fab that silicon anew, and this is really expensive. Then you have to test all these things before you put them up there. So you need to put your device in a vacuum-rad chamber. Governments are not so hot on just having these rad sources laying about and letting a piece of silicon 'cook' next to a power station that is in use. So you do accelerated testing, aka, super radiation. I've been in those chambers before, it's scary. After the magic glow machines are turned off, you have to evac all the air as the O2 in the room has been turned into O3 and you can't breathe in there. The roaches in the corners are literally cooked and brittle. It's nuts. Unfortunately for your testing, this environment is more like the sun's corona than the Earth-Mars transit, so you have to take the testing with a grain of salt. Also your vac chamber is not nearly as good as real space. So everything is oxidized and hat messes up your analysis. You do the best you can, but we don't get many sample returns from outside the Earth's magnetic field to test against. NASA et al do a GREAT job, but they are dealing with very extreme jobs and we just don't have a lot of data about what we are dealing with. We can't do a lot of in situ tests.
And since the fabs that manufacture this kind of stuff are working at a relatively large technology node, it's non-trivial to design something like an i5 for space. Why? Well, Intel and friends have no interest setting up an entire fab process that will be utilized once in a blue moon. Even if you could use a more advanced node, the extremely high circuit area overhead required to realize the requirements I listed above will remain a limiting factor.
- radiation: electrons, protons, heavy ions (MOSFETs are very vulnerable)
- cold temperatures (up to -235 degree celsius)
- high temperatures (up to +250 celsius, and there's no air-cooling in space)
The performance of electronics vary greatly depending on radiation amount and type, and temperature. You can absolutely not throw consumer electronics (GoPro) in deep space and expect it to function.
As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the consumer grade devices cannot withstand the extremes of space (not just temp extremes, also high energy rays/particles we're shielded from here).
(I realise it's not your main point, but broadcasting 60fps video across the solar system sounds like it might need a LOT of power, no matter of sensitive the receiver is.)
This [0] is an interesting read on some of the considerations for the Curiosity rover cameras.
[0] https://www.dpreview.com/articles/0353350380/curiosity-inter...