Yes, that’s the short of it. Each pixel needs its own wires, readout, and processing chain, and resources are limited on the spacecraft. The cryostat (instrument that keeps the pixels cold) only has so much cooling capacity and all the wires add thermal load.

Future missions are planned with more pixels (Take a look at the EASA Athena mission and its X-IFU instrument), and to reach that goal they are using multiplexing methods to allow more pixels to run on fewer wires.

A normally very NSFW comic called Oglaf. Brilliantly written, but don’t browse at work.

Also, since you said What?

Makes more sense with the prior comic.

Appreciate the piped link!

Another small quality-of-life feature that’s nice about Lemmy.