Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 333 posts

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

#281

Post by jcun4128 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #266
davesque wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I hear you on that. Another possibility is that NPR is trying to manufacture a sense of mystery or surprise as journalists often do with science stories. A bit less nefarious but also sort of annoying in its own way.

It's more than annoying. It comes part and parcel with the dumbing down of society.

I find a lot of content on YT is like that. The actual work is skipped hand-waved then it's every other second cut scene and some music on top... Idk. Started unsubscribing from channels lately. Still some good ones.

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

#282

Post by tomrod »

skylanh wrote: post #182
tomrod wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if each node communicated within its 150ms sphere, and you place nodes 10ms (3,000 km?), could this serve as a mesh network?

I think you have an interesting idea, but might not be thinking of the physics involved. > The minimum distance from the Earth to Mars is about 54.6 million kilometers. The farthest apart they can be is about 401 million km. The average distance is about 225 million km. Loosely, the speed of light is ~300,000km/s. So 182s, 1333s, and 750s as an absolute minimum length of time from end to end. So, there are varying or…

Array? Nah, just a very dense distribution :)

But I appreciate the thought you put into this. Thank you!

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

#283

Post by asymptosis »

rajandatta wrote: post #253

Anyone else look at the headline and feel this is one of the dumbest headlines ever. It makes it sound like NASA's incompetent. 'Why haven't you fixed Hubble yet?'. There doesn't seem to be any nuance or respect that they're trying to repair an orbiting telescope that was launched 30 years ago and designed 40 years ago - and that people are patiently trying to sort through a fully autonomous system 400 miles above th…

I thought they were riffing on recent UFO hype.

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

#284

Post by JJMcJ »

davesque wrote: post #264
rajandatta wrote: post #253

Anyone else look at the headline and feel this is one of the dumbest headlines ever. It makes it sound like NASA's incompetent. 'Why haven't you fixed Hubble yet?'. There doesn't seem to be any nuance or respect that they're trying to repair an orbiting telescope that was launched 30 years ago and designed 40 years ago - and that people are patiently trying to sort through a fully autonomous system 400 miles above th…

Yeah, I hear you on that. Another possibility is that NPR is trying to manufacture a sense of mystery or surprise as journalists often do with science stories. A bit less nefarious but also sort of annoying in its own way.

Either mystery or bad puns based on the science.

Extra points if you can throw "Einstein" in the headline.

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

#285

Post by atommclain »

privong wrote: post #161
atommclain wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hazy memory is that the NRO offered NASA a few satellite bodies that they could populate with optic systems. Since they were originally designed for monitoring earth they aren’t well suited for capturing data at much longer distances. If I recall correctly I think someone explained that it’s like trying to peer through a straw, it works, but ideally you’d want a much wider field of view. And apparently the James W…

The NRO satellites actually have an optical design with a larger field of view than Hubble does. One of the NRO spacecraft busses is being use for the WFIRST / Nancy Grace Roman space telescope because of the wider field of view.

Good info, thanks for the corrections!

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

#286

Post by dangrossman »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #255
wongarsu wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that despite regular servicing back when we still had the Space Shuttle. Hubble started out with 6 gyroscopes, in 1996 they replaced four of them, by 1999 four had failed so they replaced all six, by 2009 three had failed again, so they replaced all six. Now they are again down to three, and one of the remaining ones has a defect that required some workarounds. The last three gyros are at least a new design that…

It sounds like a specific failure of gyros, what characteristic causes that failure? Are they more susceptible to cosmic rays or something? Do you know how they've mitigated that failure?

This webpage describes Hubble's gyros and the reason some of the earlier ones failed: https://esahubble.org/about/general/gyroscopes/

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

#287

Post by skissane »

mhh__ wrote: post #259
rajandatta wrote: post #253

Anyone else look at the headline and feel this is one of the dumbest headlines ever. It makes it sound like NASA's incompetent. 'Why haven't you fixed Hubble yet?'. There doesn't seem to be any nuance or respect that they're trying to repair an orbiting telescope that was launched 30 years ago and designed 40 years ago - and that people are patiently trying to sort through a fully autonomous system 400 miles above th…

> Anyone else look at the headline and feel this is one of the dumbest headlines ever. It makes it sound like NASA's incompetent. 'Why haven't you fixed Hubble yet?'. I didn't get that impression. This does intrigue me - I like browsing hackernews, but I often get the impression that some people (not the PC specifically) here are either ridiculously anal about English or genuinely do not parse sentences the way I do.

> I often get the impression that some people (not the PC specifically) here are either ridiculously anal about English or genuinely do not parse sentences the way I do.

People with autistic traits sometimes parse sentences in an overly literal or precise manner. I rarely do this anymore, but when I was a child and teenager I did it more often.

When I'm speaking of "autistic traits", I'm not speaking just of people diagnosed with autism/ASD (who are of course represented here), but also people with broad autism phenotype (BAP), the subclinical manifestation of ASD. BAP is when you have more of the symptoms of ASD than the average person does, but not enough to justify an actual diagnosis of ASD. BAP is quite common in software engineers, and STEM professionals more generally, so I think there are likely a lot of people on this site with BAP (albeit most of them have probably never heard of it.) The people you are talking about quite possibly do have some degree of BAP, and this behaviour is quite possibly a manifestation of their BAP.

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

#288

Post by foxpurple »

spockz wrote: post #257
rajandatta wrote: post #253

Anyone else look at the headline and feel this is one of the dumbest headlines ever. It makes it sound like NASA's incompetent. 'Why haven't you fixed Hubble yet?'. There doesn't seem to be any nuance or respect that they're trying to repair an orbiting telescope that was launched 30 years ago and designed 40 years ago - and that people are patiently trying to sort through a fully autonomous system 400 miles above th…

To me this title comes across as just factual and not diminutive in any way.

Can’t work out gives a sense that they have tried everything and failed. “Haven’t worked out yet” is still factual and implies that they are still working on it.

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

#289

Post by bee_rider »

pc86 wrote: post #195
kbelder wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversation.

It's arguably even worse than just commenting "This." At least that is small enough you can scan over it and barely even register its existence. But this fedora-tipping "Thank you kind sir this is the type of Internet Content I enjoy!" doesn't even afford you that luxury.

This sort of comment is why I still read HN!

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

#290

Post by tharkun__ »

geoduck14 wrote: post #274
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more than annoying. It comes part and parcel with the dumbing down of society.

Most of my work could benefit from a journalist > Overworked Engineer misses semicolon. All night review session finds it, data gets loaded! > Management insists Jira stories be routed to new Epic. Team Lead spends hours learning Jira API before giving up and doing it "the hard way"

Completely not related to the topic at hand but ;)

I love this "spend hours figuring out the API" then giving up.

Maybe it's just me but I have noticed that a lot (and it mean a lot) of devs will overestimate greatly on anything manual they need to do that they don't like. And spend hours if not days trying to automate it. Which is fine if it's gonna be needed again soon or over and over. But really, what is so bad in spending literally 5 minutes doing the above manually with a Jira filter and bulk edit? And by extension sometimes there's not even a bulk edit and you need to do something by clicking the same 5 steps 50 times to acgieve something. Again 5 minutes of actual work. Just put on a nice fast song from whatever music genre you happen to love and do it. Done.

Is it just me?

Post reply on HN