[X] My Assistant

[Fox]

I understand that Pioneer 10 & 11's imaging photopolarimeters were different from cameras on later spacecraft. But I'm wondering what the "focal length" equivalent might have been. In other words, were the photopolarimeters "zoomed in" like a telescope, or did they behave like something closer to a 50mm "normal" lens on a modern camera? I realize this is probably comparing apples to oranges, but I was wondering how they worked in this respect.

[JRehling]

Here are some interesting tech specs:

https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/experiment/...id=1972-012A-07

It may indeed be hard to compare those details to a more conventional telescope, but one way or another there was some effective limit to the resolution, which would correspond to that spec for such a telescope. By the back of my envelope, the resolution was about as good as or worse than that of a typical handheld camera of the pre-cell-phone era.