On Thursday, November 13, 2014 3:29:07 AM UTC-5, Martin Brown wrote:
On 13/11/2014 00:38, RichA wrote:
What the heck? Even the non-comet images look like they were taken by a VGA digital camera, circa 1995.

That is probably not too far from the truth.

Space qualified kit that gets built into a landing probe that takes a
decade to arrive tends to be very conservative in their design and
capabilities. Design started soon after 1993 funding approval so they
would be quite limited in their choice of low power imaging sensors.

The lander to orbiter uplink is only 16kbaud and it has a whole 4W of
solar panel to power everything in addition to its batteries.

It should have had an RTG for power, especially now that it seems to be moored in the shadow of a hill so the solar panels may not get enough light to provide sufficient power.