Moving fast to make launch, we had missed a harness checkout step that would’ve caught a missing comms connection into an FPGA, and it was masked because our redundant comms channel made everything look nominal.

On orbit, we fixed it by pushing an FPGA update and adding software-level switching between the channels to prove the update applied and isolate the hardware path — which worked. Broader lesson, it is possible to design a sw stack capable of making updates to traditionally burned-in components.

Clarity is designed for a GSD (ground sample distance) of 10 cm. Generally the industry uses resolution<>GSD interchangeably. Agree it's not the true definition of resolution. But I'd argue the diffraction limit is an incomplete metric as well, like how spatial sampling is balanced with other MTF contributors (e.g. jitter/smear). For complete metrics, we like 1) NIIRS or 2) % contrast for a given object size on the ground (i.e. system MTF translated to ground units, not image-space units).

The main performance goal for us was NIIRS 7, and we decomposed GSD/MTF/SNR contributors optimized for affordability when we architected the system