this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
76 points (97.5% liked)
Technology
60090 readers
2829 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The article explains it was launched last year and that is 6x6 pixels. But why not 7x7 or more? Is it due to the necessary cooling to just about absolute zero?
Yes, that's the short of it. Each pixel needs its own wires, readout, and processing chain, and resources are limited on the spacecraft. The cryostat (instrument that keeps the pixels cold) only has so much cooling capacity and all the wires add thermal load.
Future missions are planned with more pixels (Take a look at the EASA Athena mission and its X-IFU instrument), and to reach that goal they are using multiplexing methods to allow more pixels to run on fewer wires.
I don't know about cooling specifically, but for most space-bound equipment, it's all about SWaP: space (volume of the equipment on the rocket), weight (more weight means more propellant needed), and power (you only get so many watts out of a given solar panel, and if you want more, go back to step one).
So they presumably found that 6x6 is an acceptable configuration for the available resources.
And that doesn't even touch on the equipment itself, like _WC did. More pixels means more complexity means more engineering, testing, etc.