NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope • Hacker News Board

Re: NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope

#21

Post by pbourke » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

Koshkin wrote: post #14

qzw wrote: post #7

pushes up glasses I would watch the heck out of a Twitch stream of their debugging/brainstorming sessions. I always loved the movie Apollo 13 , especially the technical troubleshooting parts.

Debugging on a computer that is down is not a very exciting process.

Speak for yourself

Re: NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope

#22

Post by dylan604 » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

fouric wrote: post #17

I know that, at different times, NASA has used Forth[1] and Lisp[2] in some of their space applications. Both of these languages offer REPLs that generally accelerate the debugging process, and while your "average" Lisp might be unsuitable for hard real-time applications (due to the presence of a garbage collector, usually without the hard real-time constraints that you can get out of garbage collectors with extreme…

What if you backup is failing in the exact same way?

Re: NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope

#23

Post by ianbooker » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

Koshkin wrote: post #6

They should have moved to the cloud. /ducks

They did:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_Observatory_for_...

Re: NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope

#24

Post by BlewisJS » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #13

Koshkin wrote: post #6

They should have moved to the cloud. /ducks

AWS Lens: giant satellite telescope control as a service!

This kinda already exists: https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/

Re: NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope

#25

Post by dylan604 » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

desktopninja wrote: post #20

For pure comedic value: Someone deployed a K8s cluster on hubble and now its lost DNS because the master nodes connected to a starlink satellite

More likely they got it to run Doom.

Re: NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope

#26

Post by behnamoh » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

Off-topic but it reminded me of that story about using LISP for debugging a spacecraft remotely from the Earth:

https://baltazaar.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/a-story-about-lis...

Re: NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope

#27

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:39 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #13

Koshkin wrote: post #6

They should have moved to the cloud. /ducks

AWS Lens: giant satellite telescope control as a service!

[deleted]

Re: NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope

#28

Post by falcolas » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:39 PM UTC

tomrod wrote: post #11

Koshkin wrote: post #6

They should have moved to the cloud. /ducks

This is a truly stellar wit. But in all honesty, how would an internet across the solar system work?

Slowly.

There's open efforts to work on a protocol that would work with the extreme latency and packet loss. They're really quite fascinating.

Re: NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope

#29

Post by programmer_an » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

Programmer/analyst here and ready to help you NASA, just ask me and I'll clear a few hours of my agenda for you. I know people say this a lot, but in this case I really think a (at least partial) rewrite in Rust of the Hubble software would be very beneficial. We could gather some of the most distinguished coders here in hacker-news and create a task force to show them the benefits of rust's memory safety.

Re: NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope

#30

Post by programmer_an » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:41 PM UTC

I know people say this a lot, but in this case I really think a (at least partial) rewrite in Rust of the Hubble software would be very beneficial. We could gather some of the most distinguished coders here in hacker-news and create a task force to show them the benefits of rust's memory safety.