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I was watching the NASA live stream, and it was surreal how all they were looking at was a Github repository webpage (presumably on their own GH instance) being

by pferde 6y ago

I was watching the NASA live stream, and it was surreal how all they were looking at was a Github repository webpage (presumably on their own GH instance) being refreshed, and text output of some scripts, as the data was rolling in, processed and interpreted. For any computer geek it was very cool, too. Very different to similar events near Earth, where everything is observed in real time, and there is a lot of cameras pointed at whatever is happening from all angles. :) Anyway, congrats to the NASA team, and I'm looking forward to Ingenuity's further trips.

walrus01 6y ago
To me it looked kind of like they were using the GitHub in a browser page to cover up a CLI script or automation tool that they don't want to show to the whole world... Resolution of the stream wasn't quite high enough to be certain.
- pferde 6y ago
  They were refreshing the page, and I saw a new line appear every now and then, and later also (I think) a graph too. So I am assuming that it was a repo where their various tools outputted processed results of the incoming data.
  - walrus01 6y ago
    Good to know that serious scientists have also been seen to click the refresh button on a browser page, like a lab mouse hitting the button for a food pellet dispenser... Have done it myself in the past, at critical moments with a 1Hz precision snmpget of data from some network monitoring equipment.
gspr 6y ago
Is it so weird, though? Isn't this the kind of workflow that lies behind most serious work as long as the end product isn't supposed to be shipped off to some third party that isn't expected to have internal knowledge?
- pferde 6y ago
  Of course. :) I did not mean the "surreal" adjective in any negative way, it's just that from all NASA or SpaceX event streams in past several years, we're all used to seeing something more tangible, like camera views, and almost zero delay, since they're usually close enough for that. Here, all there was to see was the part that they usually do not show at all.
  - walrus01 6y ago
    I think they mentioned in the Livestream that telemetry was coming in at 1Hz, presumably precision steps for each data point.
    - martyvis 6y ago
      Yep. My guess is that allows them to confirm the flight plan worked and the vehicle was safe at the end, so that they could time box the report in the hour. Presumably the higher resolution data, prettier video (and maybe audio?? ) is flowing through the pipeline as we speak.
olex 6y ago
My first thought was that they are using an Enterprise Github instance for processing the data. Not much different from a CI pipeline - you get a bunch of sources (in this case, raw data from the helicopter and the rover, packaged and presumably compressed for fast and reliable transfer over the DSN), and you need to take it apart, analyze it, generate various reports and graphs and whatnot... and it looked like the dude who was reporting on the data processing progress was basically reading out the completed jobs from the pipeline progression.

by pferde 6y ago

walrus01 6y ago

To me it looked kind of like they were using the GitHub in a browser page to cover up a CLI script or automation tool that they don't want to show to the whole world... Resolution of the stream wasn't quite high enough to be certain.

pferde 6y ago
They were refreshing the page, and I saw a new line appear every now and then, and later also (I think) a graph too. So I am assuming that it was a repo where their various tools outputted processed results of the incoming data.
- walrus01 6y ago
  Good to know that serious scientists have also been seen to click the refresh button on a browser page, like a lab mouse hitting the button for a food pellet dispenser... Have done it myself in the past, at critical moments with a 1Hz precision snmpget of data from some network monitoring equipment.

gspr 6y ago

Is it so weird, though? Isn't this the kind of workflow that lies behind most serious work as long as the end product isn't supposed to be shipped off to some third party that isn't expected to have internal knowledge?

pferde 6y ago
Of course. :) I did not mean the "surreal" adjective in any negative way, it's just that from all NASA or SpaceX event streams in past several years, we're all used to seeing something more tangible, like camera views, and almost zero delay, since they're usually close enough for that. Here, all there was to see was the part that they usually do not show at all.
- walrus01 6y ago
  I think they mentioned in the Livestream that telemetry was coming in at 1Hz, presumably precision steps for each data point.
  - martyvis 6y ago
    Yep. My guess is that allows them to confirm the flight plan worked and the vehicle was safe at the end, so that they could time box the report in the hour. Presumably the higher resolution data, prettier video (and maybe audio?? ) is flowing through the pipeline as we speak.

olex 6y ago

My first thought was that they are using an Enterprise Github instance for processing the data. Not much different from a CI pipeline - you get a bunch of sources (in this case, raw data from the helicopter and the rover, packaged and presumably compressed for fast and reliable transfer over the DSN), and you need to take it apart, analyze it, generate various reports and graphs and whatnot... and it looked like the dude who was reporting on the data processing progress was basically reading out the completed jobs from the pipeline progression.