NASA’s Orion spacecraft reaches the moon, flying 81 miles above the surface

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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