311–320 of 333 posts
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.
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…
Forth yes, lisp not. Lisp was only used on ground to simulate the rover. Also a repl in space only makes sense in earth orbit, but not farther away, with 8-20min waiting time for a packet roundtrip to Mars. Those machines really need proper and faster decision making (AI, think lots of `if` statements and proper modeling) on board, eg to perform landing or docking maneuvers. Or to detect and workaround radiation dama…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Missing from the list are the space telescopes that look inwards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen
> A NASA history of the Hubble,[24] in discussing the reasons for switching from a 3-meter main mirror to a 2.4-meter design, states: "In addition, changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites."
Hubble was derived from these spy satellites.
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.
In case you haven't seen it: https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hubble is basically a repurposed spy satellite so it may still be sensitive. Although I doubt any of its sisters are still flying.
On the contrary I doubt that the US military would give up advanced imaging technology, like reading car plates from space, for nothing. That's the Hubble. Nothing else comes close.
The question is not "is the US military still doing telescope-based surveillance?" it's "is the US military doing it with Hubble-class stuff, or are they doing it with newer stuff?"
Given the age and amount of hands-on maintenance required to keep the Hubble working, it's almost certain they're doing it with newer stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Missing from the list are the space telescopes that look inwards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen
Fascinating buried lead: > A NASA history of the Hubble,[24] in discussing the reasons for switching from a 3-meter main mirror to a 2.4-meter design, states: "In addition, changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites." Hubble was derived from these spy satellites.
There are estimated to have been something like seventeen of the KH-11 satellites, each one of which cost something like 2/3s of a Nimitz class aircraft carrier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen
And there are an unknown number of its successor, but probably at least 3, where they updated it for stealth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misty_(satellite)
It feels like a parallel universe where what is a technical struggle and tour de force here, is churned out by the dozens.
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…