[FourtySeven]

That's interesting......so why are the pictures so grainy, relatively? Is it because some of the resolution had to be sacrificed for durability in extreme conditions?

[null and void]

Part of that might be because sand is grainy???

As for the rest:

Is it because some of the resolution had to be sacrificed for durability in extreme conditions?

the article says: "The CCD chip also has extremely large 'storage wells' behind each pixel. The chip can store a little more than 200,000 electrons in each well, Wadsworth [the designer] said, compared with perhaps 20,000 for a commercial digital camera. Larger well sizes help the camera cope with radiation and also with the extreme temperature range, since thermally generated background charge can fill the wells."