Eli5 why is it so hard to get really good quality pictures in space or on other planets?
In: Physics
It’s hard, because space is hard, but the pictures available are outstanding. You’ll need to be a lot more specific about what pictures you have quality issues.
It isn’t actually hard. The main limiters is data transfer speeds. If you check nasa.gov you can find images with insane resolutions.
Other planets are insanely far away, and small so getting a signal back is hard. To even get a signal you have to point a dish pretty much directly at the sender. To show you how hard this is stand on the side of the road and look at the cars passing by and try find to every person wearing earrings, you’re lucky if you can find one. This is what you have to do constantly to get a signal. Light takes several minutes to reach Mars, and if we don’t catch all the signal we have to send it again. This slows down the download speed.
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It’s not hard to get good quality pictures.
The difficulty with unmanned missions is getting those pictures transmitted back to Earth.
Taking a digital SLR on a manned mission and bringing back the SD card gets you great pictures.
It’s not. Some of the best camera humans have ever invented are on spy satellites, space telescopes, and rovers.
What you’re seeing is the confluence of three main things.
1) Space is very far away and transmitting large amounts of data is hard and slow. What we see early on earth is usually a lower resolution *transmission*. The high resolution files are sent later when scientists decide which ones they want.
2) Space is very far away and it takes years to get anywhere. So the cameras are as good as they could make *several years ago*. They can’t carry the latest tech because they don’t have warp drive.
3) Almost all the places we visit and things we look at are farther away from the sun than us, so dimmer, so harder and slower to take really good photos. That’s light’s fault, not the camera.
It’s not, your premise is wrong. There are thousands of extremely high quality images from space. Take 30 seconds to look. Have you never seen pictures from the Hubble Telescope? Or from Perseverance Or Cassini? You just see the initial low-res black and white versions first because data transmission rates are slow and those images come in first.
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