For instance, the footage on Perseverance's landing was also all from off-the-shelf hardware. The Ingenuity helicopter is also largely off-the-shelf gear, it uses a plain old Snapdragon 801 as its main processor running Linux. Perseverance also uses an Intel Atom processor (although it carries 2) to receive footage from all the cameras and compress them, compared to the main processor, which is an ancient PowerPC chip. IIRC there was also a cubesat which used a smartphone as its processor and several others which have used Raspberry Pis. A GoPro has also been to space earlier this year.
I can't find details on NASA's designs, but I suspect you'd mostly need a new casing. Something radiation-tolerant (most plastic degrades quickly) and maybe radiation-shielding if it messes with the electronics too much. For temperature you could just run it through a few cycles on Earth and see what breaks. Probably nothing, given the GoPro's lack of moving parts and general ruggedness.
The rugged, icy, salt-water environments the GoPro is designed for are, in many ways, a lot more demanding than space.
They're using GoPro 4's, which is somewhat interesting, as the 11 just came out. So, old tech (8 years old or so) that's been heavily modified to work in space. I'm reminded some janky PowerPC powers the FORTRAN code that runs the Hubble.
It is romantic to think that the Earthrise photo was taken with a Hasselblad medium format camera.
If they found new cameras with better heat dissipation, they would still go with old ones, otherwise they would have to recertify the new ones, which would take ages.
My conspiracy side thinks NASA wants the opportunity to review the high resolution photos and video before they are revealed to the public.
(Not that I am convinced that this is the real reason why NASA is not releasing images quickly.)
Pictures of the moon fall under ITAR?
On the ground we've also gotten used to soft lighting conditions. Light in space works pretty differently from that on ground. On Earth we have more diffuse lighting as the light of the sun gets spread out from the atmosphere. There are many (MANY) surfaces for light to bounce off of and reflect from, making a more full looking light. In space, on the other hand, light is more often like a point light source. Your background is (effectively) the blackest of blacks. Your foreground is extremely bright. Cameras have pretty limited dynamic ranges. This also contributes to the blurryness you see and why the shadows look "off" (there's actually conspiracy theories around shadows on the moon because of this misunderstanding).
So even after we get all that 4k video things will still be "off" but like areoform is saying, we've come an incredibly long ways. I for one am excited for all these images. But also don't expect them to look like what you're used to on Earth. (and take this message as a warning for incoming conspiracies)
This reminds me of a not-so-fun fact where the original Apollo 11 data tapes were presumed saved elsewhere and were likely erased and recorded over. [0] The video that still remains from "one small step" is essentially a recording of a recording. Since the 10 FPS raw feed wasn't compatible with the TV broadcast standards at the time, they essentially pointed a normal TV camera at a TV displaying the source feed.
However, some better quality broadcast recorded tapes were found, restored, and released in 2009. [1]
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/not-unsolved-mysteries-the-lost...
Orion is the most media consumption focused craft that NASA has ever sent out. There are 16 cameras on the mission, ranging from,
On the ground, we've gotten used to fairly high bandwidth communications system, but Orion is using NASA's Deep Space Network. There just isn't enough bandwidth to downlink the kind of pristine imagery that people want.We'll have to wait until the capsule comes back home to watch all of the 4k video that this machine is capturing.
We have come a long way though, when the Apollo missions were going on, all they had were grainy TV broadcasts. They had to wait for weeks to get those gorgeous images out.