Wouldn't it be a good idea to open the source code for community inspection? Of course NASA would panic with Russia and China inspecting for "hostile" actions, but hey, if they don't know what to do, why not calling the expert reverse engineers of the world?
NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope
31–40 of 333 posts
Re: NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope
#32For 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
#33Damn Windows updates...
Getting downvoted so I guess I need to clarify I was being sarcastic. I work in IT and we say this a lot.
Re: NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope
#34I 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
#35The cause of the failure is most likely tin whiskers [1] or radiation. [1] https://nepp.nasa.gov/WHISKER/background/index.htm .
Is there evidence of either yet? I’m not sure how you get from “potential” failure mode to “most likely”
They're trying to find the broken component; what caused the issue is usually a handful of things in space. Those are usually the top causes of component failure in that environment.
Re: NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
AWS Lens: giant satellite telescope control as a service!
This kinda already exists: https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/
Is this becoming the tech equivalent of "not The Onion"? Pick an implausible service and guess if it's actually available on AWS...
Re: NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope
#37I 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?
That would probably mean that the whole thing just isn't there anymore.
Re: NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope
#38I 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…
>"The rule of thumb is when something is working you don't change it," Hertz said. "We'd like to change as few things as possible when we bring Hubble back into service."
Re: NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope
#39I can't figure out what's causing computer issues on my desk. I'm not even in space.
Re: NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope
#40> Most of Hubble's components have redundant back-ups, so once scientists figure out the specific component that's causing the computer problem, they can remotely switch over to its back-up part. Of course they do! I wonder if they ever had to put another part out of service. I also wonder whether the twin of the part could also suffer the same failure at the same time without being used.
Gyroscopes are in short supply on Hubble currently