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

npr.org

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

#291

Post by mancerayder »

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.

> trying to manufacture a sense of mystery or surprise

That's a positive spin on clickbait.

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

#292

Post by literallyaduck »

I heard from an insider that it was a popup from an unlicensed copy of winrar, I have notified my neighbors and the braintrust of grandchildren, nephews, nieces and a corgi are working out a solution, unfortunately they are having problems getting minecraft, roboblox and fortnight to work with the payload software. The experts who originally wrote the code and then retired and are unable to help since the suffered from covid related 5g headaches. The management then outsourced the problem but cannot understand the contractors not because of a language barrier but because on Zoom debugging calls they are required to wear masks even though an ocean separates them. Never fear I'm dual booting Arch (BTW) and Windows 11 and have written a preliminary AI, Blockchain, ML application in Visual Basic and am on the case, it now routes through an Android app on the Amazon app store that can communicate to a Ham tower through a TNC and a Baofeng radio but I am waiting on a part from an overseas shipment. FedEx says it is still in transit on the "Ever given" which was routed through Ireland and was blocked by a creature called the waterhorse, but I gave it tree fiddy.

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

#293

Post by Nextgrid »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #268
grumple wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true. If something's working, you don't change it for no reason. Business requirements and requests change all the time . 90% of our work is done in response to that. The other 10% is fixing up technical problems due to increased scaling or bugs found, and then basically never do we upgrade a system to keep up with security updates or change to a more modern tech.

> This is not true. If something's working, you don't change it for no reason Sure, there's often a reason like "we wanted to write it in a different language" or "we've overhauled the UI to be slower and more cumbersome".

"we need to justify our front-end developers' and designers' jobs"

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

#294

Post by nonameiguess »

macksd wrote: post #201
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.

Honestly that movie is a lot of why I got into math and engineering. Jim Lovell was undeniably a badass but I watched that movie and thought the heroes were the ones reading telemetry off a computer screen and using their slide rule to figure out what to do. I hope Hidden Figures does that for another generation.

Not was. Is!

I noticed on the last season of the Expanse that Luna headquarters was named after him and bothered to look him up. Dude's 93 and still kicking!

It's amazing how well the astronaut medical screening worked. Unless they get killed in the line of duty, these guys are all living incredibly long.

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

#295

Post by rajandatta »

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.

I'm not sure how much more mystery one neds than 'Only orbiting telescope in human history has a fault our best engineers haven't diagnosed as yet!' :-)

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

#296

Post by nonameiguess »

3pt14159 wrote: post #197
diamondo25 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of preparation is much, much more than every other "accessible" installation. Typos are the worst to recover from, backspace usually doesnt exist. As I've sent commands to our Linux-running satellites, its usually prepending your commands with ctrl-c characters and a couple newlines at the end, just to make sure it runs and nothing is left in the buffer. There is also a possibility that commands get execut…

I'm surprised theres no error correction in your uplink. Crazy.

One of the more interesting projects I ever had to complete was while awaiting clearance when I first started working for the NRO years back in ground processing algorithms (no longer work there, by the way). One of the long time guys gave us an assignment to implement the BCH error-correcting code, and then iteratively optimize it until we were able to implement the algorithm for computing the code published in a company proprietary whitepaper that was more efficient than any of the publicly published algorithms. That was just everything that is fun about programming. The actual production implementation corrected up to 8 bits per block, though I can't remember the block size any more.

Ground processing was a totally separate program and contract from mission control, though, so my team only ever received data from the satellites. We never sent data to them.

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

#297

Post by nonameiguess »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #268
grumple wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true. If something's working, you don't change it for no reason. Business requirements and requests change all the time . 90% of our work is done in response to that. The other 10% is fixing up technical problems due to increased scaling or bugs found, and then basically never do we upgrade a system to keep up with security updates or change to a more modern tech.

> This is not true. If something's working, you don't change it for no reason Sure, there's often a reason like "we wanted to write it in a different language" or "we've overhauled the UI to be slower and more cumbersome".

This highly depends. I believe what Grumple is talking about is contracted work for a specific customer that is asking you for something different, even though what you've already delivered works. You're talking about consumer-facing product teams that make whatever they want and try to sell it after the fact, coming to their own decisions regarding what their "requirements" should be. When your work is funded by a specific customer, the requirements are whatever that customer says they are. And they're almost never going to let you change something just because you wanted to in order to learn a technology you can put on your resume.

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

#299

Post by imoverclocked »

rajandatta wrote: post #295
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.

I'm not sure how much more mystery one neds than 'Only orbiting telescope in human history has a fault our best engineers haven't diagnosed as yet!' :-)

Interestingly, we humans actually have more than just Hubble floating around up there in the way of telescopes.

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

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

#300

Post by tambourine_man »

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…

Is Windows still like that or was that tongue in cheek? I run my Mac for months, only restart for updates.
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