This touches so closely on a recent anecdote that I must share.<p>The FIRST Robotics team I mentor just finished their season this past weekend. Something they did last-minute was add a GoPro to their grabber because they wanted to see some neat footage of it working, and maybe use it to improve the design or fix issues.<p>Then one of the students had the idea to just put it in real-time mode and watch it live from their phone. Which instantly became an invaluable tool for controlling the arm effectively. They couldn't live without it after that. I think it was against rules to have a wireless device, so they took the idea and applied it to a USB camera that fed to a video output on the drive computer.<p>I'm sure other teams already came up with this, but I was just so impressed to see that organic process happen with a bunch of 10th and 11th graders. They learned a practical example of all the buzzwordy things like "think outside the box" and "no idea is a bad idea" and "don't engineer everything, sometimes just throw ideas and see what sticks." I'm just so proud of them.
>All this camera hacking was done hastily just days before the mission and on a camera that was essentially a $40 point-and-shoot toy.<p>That's a bit unkind. $40 in 1962 is would be about $400 adjusting for inflation and those Minolta fixed lens rangefinders were excellent cameras and pretty much state of the art consumer cameras, especially the auto-exposure. Of course it's no Nikon F or Hasselblad (those went to the moon later-on) but you could do a lot worse in 1962.
Not going to say anything about the inflation figures.<p>But the general tone of Petapixel is a perfect example of photography media still not getting it with the constant tone of "cheap things are toys" and fancy things are "serious tools". Nothing used to take the photos in space taken handheld can be a toy by definition, hindsight is 20/20 and yet they still make this remark.<p>It's like no matter what happens people who write about photography can't figure out it's what you do with a camera that makes it a tool, not how much money you spend.<p>Most of the people playing with toys are buying the expensive toys most of the time, but realistically there is no correlation between buying luxury camera gear and making serious photos.
For those interested in the "automatic exposure" mechanism mentioned in the article, Technology Connections did a great video on it recently: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwm_Dya0PFQ">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwm_Dya0PFQ</a>
So while everyone in the comments section is amazing us all with how inflation works, what's the cost of camera today on Perseverance?<p>I'm having a rough time searching for costs on google and official pages, guess it's not a word that they like to put in PR pieces. There's 23 cameras onboard and it's not easy to work out what a single one cost.<p>Edit: this is a great paper on the devices themselves <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00765-9" rel="nofollow">https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00765-9</a>
This is interesting and hits close to home. My dad and I are collectors of flown cameras from NASA missions. We have a few early digital cameras that flew on Shuttle missions in the very early 90's and they were modified similarly (minus the pistol grip). They were essentially film camera bodies with extra modules attached that had the digital components. We also have the extra large film magazines that were used, etc.
If you like this check out <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/443162/apollo-remastered-by-saunders-andy/9780241508695" rel="nofollow">https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/443162/apollo-remastered-by-...</a><p>> In a frozen vault in Houston sits the original NASA photographic film of the Apollo missions. For half a century, almost every image of the Moon landings publicly available was produced from a lower-quality copy of these originals.<p>> Now we can view them as never before. Expert image restorer Andy Saunders has taken newly available digital scans and, applying pain-staking care and cutting-edge enhancement techniques, he has created the highest quality Apollo photographs ever produced. Never-before-seen spacewalks and crystal-clear portraits of astronauts in their spacecraft, along with startling new visions of the Earth and the Moon, offer astounding new insight into one of our greatest endeavours.<p>I saw the exhibition in Glasgow, was good!
I love what they’ve done here to get they grip to attach, using just the cold show and what looks like a pin rivet and quite possibly some epoxy. The thumb actuator to depress a custom cable release extension is gorgeous!<p>Now I want to make a replica.
Why can't more articles be like this? The headline was a one-sentence summary of the full article. It took a couple minutes to read. It was full of detail. I feel happier than I was five minutes ago.
The article makes quite few statements as if $40 is just some cheap camera. $40 in 1962 is $395 today.<p>Still much cheaper than some special custom NASA thing, but that amount buys you far more than a “cheap drugstore camera”.
I mean, it's a cool story and an awesome hack. Perfect HN distraction when I have better things to be getting on with so thanks danboarder for posting. It just slightly irks me that the article refers to it as a $40 camera so many times (14, in fact). I would imagine if you factor in several days' work by a Nasa engineering team the actual cost would rise slightly higher.
Some credit should go to Wally Schirra, who was a photography enthusiast, and took his 70mm Hasselblad on the third Mercury flight. Nasa ended up using modded Hasselblads right through the Apollo missions (and after).<p><a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/07/13/735314929/the-camera-that-went-to-the-moon-and-changed-how-we-see-it" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2019/07/13/735314929/the-camera-that-wen...</a>
If I were being snarky I could say that this makes one reminisce of days when the engineering was so important and everyone was so focused on it that there was not even time to think of the publicity and marketing of what they were about to do. Versus now, where it sometimes seems that you prepare the product launch marketing materials even before the product.<p>But of course, even NASA soon had those kinds of considerations to worry about as well, even in the 60s/70s.
Hate generally the 'if not for' type stories (usually by writers about certain inventors or some technology) . They would have figured out even if this hadn't happened that photography made sense to do.<p>Also in addition to what others have said about $40 and today's cost the modifications and time for that were not factored into the actual value of the camera.
I'm interested to know what type of film was used ? I don't mean the brand but was it transparency or print ? I mean I assume transparency but given the article's suggestion, perhaps contrived, of the whole thing being outside of normal NASA structures it's possible it was print ?
<i>on a camera that was essentially a $40 point-and-shoot toy.</i><p>Is the author intentionally trying to mislead us or is he a fool? With inflation that camera cost $400. It was not a "point and shoot toy".
> During his three-orbit mission that lasted 4 hours and 55 minutes, John Glenn took the first human-captured colored still photographs of the Earth using this camera.<p>Weird: in these photos the Earth's horizon looks rounded, rather than flat