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Hmmm. It says "designed to acquire audio events from parachute deploy to touchdown". I assumed the reason they lost audio was because it wasn't designed for th

• liquidify 6y ago
  They have certainly been vague on those details. I assume it is because they are investigating, but maybe they are trying to protect an engineering failure or some otherwise embarrassing detail from leaking. "Forgot to plug it in" might make for some ugly headlines. Probably better to just tell us already since it will inevitably come out.
• proggy 6y ago
  Per Monday’s press conference, all of the EDL cameras and the microphone were commercial off-the-shelf products. They were lightly modified to reduce the likelihood of, say, electronic components off-gassing, but were not mission critical. They were simply put there to prove a point that, hey, if we want to do something cool and can’t justify the cost of bespoke hardware, we can try to use non-space rated hardware so long as we do no harm to the spacecraft or its mission objectives. I’d say the fact that all the cameras worked, and that the microphone came online during initial surface operations checkout (recording some very cool sounds from the surface), meant that the experiment was a rousing success.