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A comment on NASA’s Orion spacecraft reaches the moon, flying 81 miles above the surface. Parent comment

Re:NASA’s Orion spacecraft reaches the moon, flying 81 miles... by kmacdough on Monday November 21, 2022 @03:41PM (#33697645)
Space is inhospitable for humans, but not so bad for tech. With no need for a cushy room-temperature, you mostly need to think about increased radiation and temperature swings.

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.

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Re:NASA’s Orion spacecraft reaches the moon, flying 81 miles... by justinator on Monday November 21, 2022 @04:00PM (#33697850)
My GoPro won't work if it's too cold (lithium battery).

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kovAmQ0jz4

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Re:NASA’s Orion spacecraft reaches the moon, flying 81 miles... by xenospn on Monday November 21, 2022 @04:25PM (#33698169)
All space hardware is old since it has to be radiation-proof and proven reliable above all else.
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Re:NASA’s Orion spacecraft reaches the moon, flying 81 miles... by nickff on Monday November 21, 2022 @07:16PM (#33700094)
It seems unlikely that the GoPros in question are rad-hard (there is no rad-hard GoPro that I'm aware of); it's more likely that they chose them for some other reason (perhaps some sort of validation or testing), or that these have fewer heat dissipation issues than the newer models. Heat dissipation is a frequent cause of issues for electronics in space.
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Re:NASA’s Orion spacecraft reaches the moon, flying 81 miles... by actionfromafar on Monday November 21, 2022 @07:28PM (#33700199)
They are old because the design was locked long before launch.

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.

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Re:NASA’s Orion spacecraft reaches the moon, flying 81 miles... by justinator on Monday November 21, 2022 @09:41PM (#33701085)
It's sort of fun to think, since in the Apollo missions, this certainly wasn't the case.
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Re:NASA’s Orion spacecraft reaches the moon, flying 81 miles... by TrainedMonkey on Monday November 21, 2022 @04:08PM (#33697967)
To add to that - vacuum can also mess up sealed components that were manufactured at 1ATM. This is mostly a problem with electrolytic batteries and capacitors which puff up when the atmospheric pressure is removed. For batteries mitigations include manufacturing at low pressures or constraining the expansion mechanically.
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Re:NASA’s Orion spacecraft reaches the moon, flying 81 miles... by ramesh31 on Monday November 21, 2022 @08:45PM (#33700753)
Pretty sure a GoPro underwater housing would be perfectly capable of maintaining 1ATM in space. They are designed to handle many times that in external pressure.
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Re:NASA’s Orion spacecraft reaches the moon, flying 81 miles... by dsfyu404ed on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @09:58AM (#33706498)
The 1atm in space is pushing in the opposite direction. But yeah, if it's good to 5atm in pressure odds are it's good to 1atm in vacuum
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