New images of Jupiter

These come from Juno, a mission sent in 2011 and orbiting Jupiter since 2016. Must say it wasn't really on my radar anymore, but looking at the timeline on Wikipedia, it's still going around and getting close ("perijove") every month and a week or so, at an ever-increasing longitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(spacecraft)#Timeline The planned end of the mission is in about a year. The camera was "included in the payload to facilitate education and public outreach [but] later re-purposed to study the dynamics of Jupiter's clouds"

Yeah, they had to fight so hard to get that camera on there! It was not included in the initial designs since it wasn't necessary for the science objectives.

Makes me wonder what it costs to send a "simple" camera along. Factors that make it probably not so simple: even 200 grams of camera (and extra solar panels to supply +10W while operating) probably costs many thousands of euros in rocket fuel and emission taxes. The engineering time to properly fixate it onto the spacecraft, integrate the software, and test the whole thing cost probably a few ten thousands in salaries. Radiation may be a big problem for what's otherwise off-the-shelf hardware, that might mean the hardware costs much more (tens of thousands instead of a couple hundred euros potentially?) and gets significantly heavier from shielding, but I wouldn't know how much. Is that about right, am I missing something major and/or am I off on orders of magnitude somewhere?

Yeah, you got a lot of it and the ripple effect of things that go out from it. In addition to the extra mass of the camera and solar arrays, there is extra mass for the harnessing to connect the camera to the computer and engineering design for that as well. Integration of anything else on the spacecraft will have to go through Failure Modes Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA). Basically, this gets in to pretty detailed circuit design analysis and makes sure that any failure on the camera itself (like a short circuit or babbling idiot data bus) won't impact the rest of the spacecraft.

Potential cost of increased storage onboard the spacecraft if it is significant data volume. Cost of downlinking the data to the ground, time on the DSN is expensive. I think the cost data sheets for DSN usage are online and it depends on data rate, what dish you are using, etc. but costs for usage are on the order of thousands per hour and data rates from Jupiter are pretty slow.

The cost of the camera itself is likely on the order of a couple hundred thousand. I've seen similar costs for small radiation hardened cameras and star trackers. The difference in parts cost for some things can be absolutely insane. Passive electrical components certainly cost more, but for active circuits it can be insane. A radiation hardened equivalent of a $20 FPGA can be something like $20,000.

All told, cost of integration and use over the mission is likely at least a few million. But on a $1.1 billion mission it still doesn't seem like a lot.

> A radiation hardened equivalent of a $20 FPGA can be something like $20,000

Has anyone actually tried putting up non-rad hardened equipment to measure how they perform? The Mars helicopter wasn't RAD hardened and used off the shelf parts & succeeded and the Mars atmosphere is not thick enough to meaningfully block the amount of cosmic rays hitting the surface.

I think NASA doesn't do a good job sometimes tolerating risk and then everything is treated as needing safety-levels of risk mitigation without considering that a 1/100th cost reduction will not generate as much in parts failures.