“Cheap” and “first in human history” rarely go together. When Apple offers a mass produced solar probe I’m sure it will have a color camera. Until then you have to be satisfied by the actual achievement instead.
We can send probes to the sun, to Mars, collect samples from asteroids billions of miles away.... but we can't get decent quality colour photos?!? That tech is beyond us? In 2024? .. wtf ...
I really don't get why my original post is downvoted and being disputed. It seems such a basic point.. It such an oversight on the part of NASA, it borders on intentional.
> It such an oversight on the part of NASA, it borders on intentional.
This is why you are being downvoted. You clearly do not understand the difficulty of these achievements. Yet you claim NASA is incompetent for doing something literally nobody has ever done before.
A color camera has no scientific value so they didn’t send one. It’s that simple.
Assuming you know more than NASA is rightfully going to earn downvotes. You don’t know more than NASA.
Approach this with an open mind and some curiosity and you’ll get a much warmer response. You might even learn something.
We already know what color the sun is. Color cameras take worse quality images and use more data to do so. The black and white images are higher fidelity and thus convey more useful information.
> You are telling me that using your visual sense is irrelevant, because of all the data that is being collected.
I’m not telling you that. Black and white pictures are still perceived with the visual sense. The picture is data.
> Ie scientists like spreadsheets of info, databases, rather than imagery that is faithful to the human eye.
Well, no, clearly they value images because they sent a camera. A human eye would be completely obliterated way before reaching the sun’s corona. It’s physically impossible for a person to perceive this environment “faithfully”.
> everyone who can use their eyes to judge information will do so
Yes but there is less useful information in a color image to judge.
> you can do both cos the overhead of a colour camera is so low!
The overhead for a useless instrument is extremely high. There are mass constraints, power constraints, and communication bandwidth constraints. A color camera would be a pointless waste of resources.
