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Hubble is back
- gdubs 8y ago“Last week the operations team commanded Hubble to perform numerous maneuvers, or turns, and switched the gyro between different operational modes, which successfully cleared what was believed to be blockage between components inside the gyro” And here I am on Earth, barely capable of debugging JavaScript code.
- TomK32 8y agoThey've probably done a "bang it with a hammer" equivalent.
- rzzzt 8y agoI shake my phone vigorously if the small motor gets stuck and stops buzzing.
- ByThyGrace 8y agoAnd it works, doesn't it?
- rzzzt 8y agoYes, it has diagnostic software which allows you to run the motor constantly. I switch it on and shake it about until it gets unstuck, run it for a few more seconds, and it's good for another three months or so.
- wereHamster 8y ago> And here I am on Earth, barely capable of debugging JavaScript code. If as much education was required of software engineers as it is from people who work on the Hubble telescope then you wouldn't have any troubles debugging JavaScript.
- protomyth 8y agoIf JavaScript was specified to the same degree as the Hubble telescope then the OP wouldn't have had a problem. Blaming gdubs's education is a bit problematic.
- TheAceOfHearts 8y agoThe ECMAScript spec is actually quite thorough and freely available to read online. In addition, it has a very large suite of tests to check for compliance. I don't think there's any other language with as many independent production-quality implementations. In what way do you think it could be better specified?
- protomyth 8y agoAnywhere the spec says "implementation-dependent" or "behavior is undefined" could be fully specified. Some might say its impractical, but given the effort folks but into the hardware and software of a NASA project, you can really see the difference.
- jjuhl 8y ago"I don't think there's any other language with as many independent production-quality implementations." - C++?
- TheAceOfHearts 8y agoYeah, it looks like you might be right. I just looked it up and there's a ton of C++ compilers I'd never heard of before.
- Tomte 8y agoSure, but the number might fool you. Not every C++ compiler is standards-compliant, and at least on the PC side, many of the good compilers bought the frontend from the Edison Design Group and focussed on the backend.
- jrootabega 8y agoIt's also fun to compare programming to surgery, where they work for hours straight with no backup on a production system that is actively trying to die.
- agumonkey 8y agoThe universe is transactional.
- elboru 8y agoIt has always amazed how hard it must be to debug an issue in a human being, you need to check A, B, and C, but if you check C your human will be scared since it could indicate your human has cancer, if you check B it will be expensive since it involves a lot of studies, you can also check with A giving some medicament but it also is expensive and maybe other people needed more. So you end up testing all three, but none gave you any feedback, the issue must be somewhere else, those tests took months and it doesn’t help you had been testing hundreds of other humans and for each case you must understand the whole context, so you have to start again, meanwhile your human starts to think you are not capable since you haven’t fixed his problem so he starts looking for a “second opinion”.
- jrootabega 8y agoPerfect explanation for why for House, M.D. was so entertaining.
- hutzlibu 8y ago
- taf2 8y agowith your javascript you can cmd+r over and over again until you figure it out. with the hubble they had to simulate and hypothesize/imagine possible solutions. It's the same process just a different medium for solving problems and they generally get only 1 chance to press cmd+r
- kabdib 8y agoHenry S F Cooper's book _The Evening Star_ describes similar solar-system-scale distance debugging of a race condition on the Magellan Venus orbiter. Pretty tense stuff; the stakes are high, the tools and insight to the actual problems are poor, and if you screw up badly enough you wind up with a dead spacecraft.
- ddingus 8y agoBecause NASA is awesome.
- ddingus 8y agoWell, they are. Yeah, I am a fan. NASA is one of the few all good things from government. Government can be better, and I hope we can make it better too. What else to say? I love a good NASA win, geek, nerd, engineering story.
- redler 8y agoAmazing. It's like they performed the Epley Maneuver on a satellite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epley_maneuver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epley_maneuver
- TomK32 8y agoThat reads worse that it actually looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqokxZRbJfw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqokxZRbJfw
- dang 8y agoUrl changed from https://twitter.com/NASAHubble/status/1056189182274625537 https://twitter.com/NASAHubble/status/1056189182274625537, which points to this.
- sidcool 8y agoAmazing. HN community disagrees on almost all topics, except something like this. Best news in the past few weeks. Kudos NASA.
- larkeith 8y agoI will never cease to be impressed by the sheer skill and quality of design at NASA, that allows them to keep missions like Hubble or Opportunity operating far beyond their planned lifetimes.
- sosorry44 8y agoIt amazes me that they are still in contact with the voyager probes. NASA does some amazing stuff.
- SpikeDad 8y agoReading about the specs and the planned degradation of the gyros is a very interesting exercise in planned reduction of a service. They know the gyros will eventually give out and they have contingency plans around what kinds of science they can continue to do even when they're down to 1 gyro. Very impressive. I'm always discouraged hearing people say NASA is wasting money and science and that's just not true IMHO.
- pmorici 8y agoYou can achieve impressive results and still be "wasting money" if there were more cost efficient ways to achieve an equivalent result. I don't have an opinion on NASA but that could be the point of view those people are coming from.
- Entalpi 8y agoThe problem with having non-science people run an organisation of science people is self explanatory. In the Netherlands they have outsourced the organisation and managment of health care to the doctors themselves (roughly speaking). It is often cited as one of the main reasons the Netherlands rank #1 in health care ratings over the years.
- seibelj 8y agoIn the US, the American Medical Association is run by doctors and they artificially limit the supply new doctors by capping the number of medical schools. So sometimes having the fox guard the henhouse is not the best way to save money.
- epmaybe 8y agoThe AMA doesn't directly govern the number of medical schools in this country. That would be the LCME (Liaison Committee on Medical Education), which is sponsored by the AMA and American Association for Medical Colleges. It's also important to note that the number of medical schools isn't really artificially limited by the LCME, as they will accredit most any medical school that meets the accreditation standards. On top of that, medical students in the US have to undergo a residency before becoming fully licensed physicians. These residencies are accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), a separate organization. However, while the ACGME can accredit these programs, the majority of funding for training resident physicians comes from the federal government (department of health and human services, center for medicare and medicaid services), and is capped by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 (modified in 1999 to accommodate the rural physician shortage). Today, this costs the federal government around $11 billion each year for all of the residents in the country. The real question, then, is who we can point to as the bottleneck for new doctors in this country. I found this article enlightening, but it may be behind a paywall: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28919221 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28919221
- zenmaster10665 8y ago"so we just gave it a shake et voilà!" - some NASA scientists, probably
- azurezyq 8y agoInteresting read. On the other hand, I remembered that hubble was manually repaired by astronauts mutliple times back in the space shuttle era. I'm wondering that, do we have capabilities to perform in-space non-ISS-kind repairs now? Soyuz may be able to do in-space rendezvous but cargo space is limited. Soyuz+Progress composition (may be too complicated)?
- craftyguy 8y agoNo we no longer have this capability. Soyuz capsules are not really designed for EVA.
- varjag 8y agoYou can do EVA with Soyuz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_5#EVA_details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_5#EVA_details However that mission will unlikely be possible for both technical and political reasons.
- InclinedPlane 8y agoServicing HST with a Soyuz is basically impossible. Hubble is in a higher altitude orbit in a significantly lower inclination than the launch site for crewed Soyuz vehicles. To perform the plane change maneuver (of 23 deg.) would require a delta-V of 1.5 km/s (20% of the orbital velocity at the typical Soyuz destination altitude). That would require bringing nearly 4 tonnes of extra propellant onboard the Soyuz, which isn't feasible. Additionally, this doesn't include the added weight of the docking adapter and Hubble replacement parts that would need to be brought along. It's conceivable that a repair mission might be possible with the soon to come into service US crew capsules (Dragon 2 and Starliner) since the rockets that launch them have more performance than the Soyuz, but even then it would be a pretty ambitious mission.
- craftyguy 8y agoYea I know you can do EVA from the Soyuz, but it's not really designed for the types of extended EVA missions required to repair the Hubble.
- ourmandave 8y agoFrom this link... http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/team_hubble/#hubbletime http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/team_hubble/#hubbletime Each year astronomers from dozens of countries vie for precious minutes of Hubble's unrivaled view of the cosmos. A review committee made up of experts from the astronomical community determines which proposed observations address pressing scientific questions and make the best use of the telescope's capabilities. Each year more than 1,000 proposals are reviewed and approximately 200 are selected, which represents roughly 20,000 individual observations. I feel bad for all the projects that got delayed. I wonder if they'll be rescheduled, or have to be resubmitted or are just out of luck.
- ambicapter 8y agoSome of them might not actually need Hubble specifically. There are a fair amount of observation platforms, maybe they can get their work done on another satellite.
- antognini 8y agoPerhaps, but given the competition for Hubble time, if you can get the data you need from another observatory you're generally better off doing so. For these competitive observatories you usually need to explain why your project actually requires those facilities.
- InclinedPlane 8y agoTo some degree yes, but most of the approved observation plans have already been sifted through the "can they get this done without Hubble?" filter.
- superkuh 8y agoHubble is back but nasa.gov is black. A blank black page. All because their web devs wanted (or were pushed into using) some crap front-end lib that has no fall-back for no javascript. nasa.gov's accessibility is absolutely terrible for a government website.
- PetahNZ 8y agoSo enable javascript?
- antoineMoPa 8y agoHaving the embedded software in the sky working well is a bit more mission-critical than having the website work without javascript.
- rrrttrrr 8y agoHow is requiring javascript an accessibility problem?
- jldugger 8y agoDidn't the NSA gift NASA two hubble class telescopes with a note along the lines 'bought a ton on bulk discount and never ending up using these two before the new model was released'?
- wongarsu 8y agoYes, but it was the NRO (I doubt the NSA owns any telescopes). NASA has plans to maybe use one of them sometime, but because of how expensive the James Webb Telescope turned out to be doesn't have money to do anything with the second. The wikipedia article gives some more context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
- yellowapple 8y agoNASA has gotten out of quite a few pickles by using Earthside clones/spares of spacecraft to troubleshoot issues with the ones actually in space. Even if NASA had the money to launch the spare telescope, they'd be wise not to.
- InclinedPlane 8y agoNot really. They gave NASA two "telescopes" that have mirrors and a chassis and basically not much else. It will still require billions of dollars and years of work to turn them into space based observatories. One of them is actually being built (WFIRST) but isn't expected to be launched until the 2020s. Also, overall there isn't a huge advantage to this hardware. It doesn't save much money as most of the cost of the telescopes is in the other components: the spacecraft parts (including the attitude control system which as we've seen with Hubble is quite important) and the instruments. The biggest advantage to the NRO gifts (the NSA doesn't have telescopes, that we know of) is not that they make building space telescopes cheaper but that they mainly just make those missions more likely to be funded.
- monocasa 8y agoWasn't hubble itself a refit of a Keyhole 11 beta?
- Jenz 8y agoYay! Cheers to Hubble!
- keithnz 8y agoI love that they basically mashed all the buttons till it started working properly :)
- datahipster 8y agoHa! They were able to recover the failed backup gyroscope by executing a series of attitude maneuvers while switching between operational modes on the gyro. They literally shook the spacecraft and turned the gyro off-and-on. Sometimes you gotta bang on something to get it to work! I would love to buy a beer for the mission operations team member who came up with that idea!
- dmix 8y agoI wish I could do that to my software sometimes. Just bang my computer to get it working.
- cam_l 8y agoIt is cathartic, even if it doesn't work.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- taf2 8y agoYou can - in Javascript for example: setTimeout(function() { ... setTimeout(function() { ... }, Math.random() 1000); }, Math.random() 1000); // winning!
- zbentley 8y agoIn that case, you may enjoy https://github.com/ajalt/fuckitpy https://github.com/ajalt/fuckitpy Or its siblings, including https://github.com/mattdiamond/fuckitjs https://github.com/mattdiamond/fuckitjs
- datahipster 8y agoFor those interested in learning the spectacular engineering that went into the Hubble: http://a.co/d/4kLahfW http://a.co/d/4kLahfW
- reneherse 8y agoThat's definitely not what I expected to find at the link! Thanks for posting it. My father was an engineer on the Hubble, Hexagon and other reconnaissance satellites, and I'm sure he'll get a kick out of this "manual" as a gift.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Cogito 8y agoFor those not wanting to click on a shortened url, the long, non referral version is https://www.amazon.com/NASA-Hubble-Space-Telescope-collaboration/dp/0857337971 https://www.amazon.com/NASA-Hubble-Space-Telescope-collabora...
- leo_song 8y ago1990-?