I mean seeing as I've literally written a program for arduino to adjust a small solar panel to find the most intense source of light and I'm at best a mediocre coder I am confident they can figure that out
I'm sure it's on a fixed mount though, not a spacecraft rotating on three axes at multiple RPM. That's not the point though. There are a myriad of other problems involved that make it not worth the effort, such as data uplink rates and solar irradiance from 2.5 AU, or arduino-killing thermals and radiation, or scarce DSN time, or micrometeroid damage to the panel and camera. All these problems have solutions, but they eat up precious and expensive engineering resources just so we can have a live stream that lasts years instead of hours at no financial benefit to SpaceX.
2
u/space_is_hard Feb 07 '18
Sensing panel output? If the output goes down, how do you figure out which way to turn the panel to compensate?