Quote:
Originally Posted by curiousuburb
The OSIRIS camera (arguably Rosetta's best) is a whopping 4 MegaPixels.  
Whippersnappers may laugh, but that would have been pretty impressive back then... and traditionally space missions stick with tried and tested hardware for reliability sake. |
So why, then, does hardware so often fail? I mean, it doesn’t surprise me because I see it happening all the time – it seems most ambitious missions have some failure or another (often multiple failures!). To the uninitiated, the hard part would seem to be escaping earth’s gravity, navigating in massive arcs through the solar system with unbelievable precision, and transmitting info back and forth over billions of kilometres. After all that, to have the bloody harpoons fail is a bit of a downer.
