Solar Dynamics Observatory: Our Solar Early Warning System

July 9, 2024 by 3 Comments

Ever since the beginning of the Space Age, the inner planets and the Earth-Moon system have received the lion’s share of attention. That makes sense; it’s a whole lot easier to get to the Moon, or even to Mars, than it is to get to Saturn or Neptune. And so our probes have mostly plied the relatively cozy confines inside the asteroid belt, visiting every world within them and sometimes landing on the surface and making a few holes or even leaving some footprints.

But there’s still one place within this warm and familiar neighborhood that remains mysterious and relatively unvisited: the Sun. That seems strange, since our star is the source of all energy for our world and the system in general, and its constant emissions across the electromagnetic spectrum and its occasional physical outbursts are literally a matter of life and death for us. When the Sun sneezes, we can get sick, and it has the potential to be far worse than just a cold.

While we’ve had a succession of satellites over the last decades that have specialized in watching the Sun, it’s not the easiest celestial body to observe. Most spacecraft go to great lengths to avoid the Sun’s abuse, and building anything to withstand the lashing our star can dish out is a tough task. But there’s one satellite that takes everything that the Sun dishes out and turns it into a near-constant stream of high-quality data, and it’s been doing it for almost 15 years now. The Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, has also provided stunning images of the Sun, like this CGI-like sequence of a failed solar eruption. Images like that have captured imaginations during this surprisingly active solar cycle, and emphasized the importance of SDO in our solar early warning system.

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Chandra X-ray Observatory Threatened By Budget Cuts

April 10, 2024 by 39 Comments

Launched aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in July of 1999, the Chandra X-ray Observatory is the most capable space telescope of its kind. As of this writing, the spacecraft is in good health and is returning valuable scientific data. It’s currently in an orbit that extends at its highest point to nearly one-third the distance to the Moon, which gives it an ideal vantage point from which to make its observations, and won’t reenter the Earth’s atmosphere for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Yet despite this rosy report card, Chandra’s future is anything but certain. Faced with the impossible task of funding all of its scientific missions with the relative pittance they’re allocated from the federal government, NASA has signaled its intent to wind down the space telescope’s operations over the next several years. According to their latest budget request, the agency wants to slash the program’s $41 million budget nearly in half for 2026. Funding would remain stable at that point for the next two years, but in 2029, the money set aside for Chandra would be dropped to just $5.2 million.

Drastically reducing Chandra’s budget by the end of the decade wouldn’t be so unexpected if its successor was due to come online in a similar time frame. Indeed, it would almost be expected. But despite being considered a high scientific priority, the x-ray observatory intended to replace Chandra isn’t even off the drawing board yet. The 2019 concept study report for what NASA is currently calling the Lynx X-ray Observatory estimates a launch date in the mid-2030s at the absolute earliest, pointing out that several of the key components of the proposed telescope still need several years of development before they’ll reach the necessary Technology Readiness Level (TRL) for such a high profile mission.

With its replacement for this uniquely capable space telescope decades away even by the most optimistic of estimates, the  potential early retirement of the Chandra X-ray Observatory has many researchers concerned about the gap it will leave in our ability to study the cosmos.

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Parachute Drops Are Still A Viable Solution For Data Recovery From High Altitude Missions

December 19, 2023 by 12 Comments

Once upon a time, when the earliest spy satellites were developed, there wasn’t an easy way to send high-quality image data over the air. The satellites would capture images on film and dump out cartridges back to earth with parachutes that would be recovered by military planes.

It all sounds so archaic, so Rube Goldberg, so 1957. And yet, it’s still a viable method for recovering big globs of data from high altitude missions today. Really, you ask? Oh, yes indeed—why, NASA’s gotten back into the habit just recently!

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The World ID Orb And The Question Of What Defines A Person

August 10, 2023 by 67 Comments

Among the daily churn of ‘Web 3.0’, blockchains and cryptocurrency messaging, there is generally very little that feels genuinely interesting or unique enough to pay attention to. The same was true for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s Ethereum blockchain-based Worldcoin when it was launched in 2021 while promising many of the same things as Bitcoin and others have for years. However, with the recent introduction of the World ID protocol by Tools for Humanity (TfH) – the company founded for Worldcoin by Mr. Altman – suddenly the interest of the general public was piqued.

Defined by TfH as a ‘privacy-first decentralized identity protocol’ World ID is supposed to be the end-all, be-all of authentication protocols. Part of it is an ominous-looking orb contraption that performs iris scans to enroll new participants. Not only do participants get ‘free’ Worldcoins if they sign up for a World ID enrollment this way, TfH also promises that this authentication protocol can uniquely identify any person without requiring them to submit any personal data, only requiring a scan of your irises.

Essentially, this would make World ID a unique ID for every person alive today and in the future, providing much more security while preventing identity theft. This naturally raises many questions about the feasibility of using iris recognition, as well as the potential for abuse and the impact of ocular surgery and diseases. Basically, can you reduce proof of personhood to an individual’s eyes, and should you?

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IR Camera Is Excellent Hacking Platform

June 1, 2023 by 14 Comments

While there have been hiccups here and there, the general trend of electronics is to decrease in cost or increase in performance. This can be seen in fairly obvious ways like more powerful and affordable computers but it also often means that more powerful software can be used in other devices without needing expensive hardware to support it. [Manawyrm] and [Toble_Miner] found this was true of a particular inexpensive thermal camera that ships with Linux installed on it, and found that this platform was nearly perfect for tinkering with and adding plenty of other features to turn it into a much more capable tool.

The duo have been working on a SC240N variant of the InfiRay C200 infrared camera, which ships with a Hisilicon SoC. The display is capable of displaying 25 frames per second, making this platform an excellent candidate for modifying. A few ports were added to the device, including USB and MicroSD, and which also allows the internal serial port to be accessed easily. From there the device can be equipped with the uboot bootloader in order to run essentially anything that could be found on any other Linux machine such as supporting a webcam interface (and including a port of DOOM, of course). The duo doesn’t stop at software modifications though. They also equipped the camera with a lens, attached magnetically, which changes the camera’s focal length to give it improved imaging capabilities at closer ranges.

While the internal machinations of this device are interesting, it actually turns out to be a fairly capable infrared camera on its own as well. The hardware and software requirements for these devices certainly don’t need a full Linux environment to work, and while we have seen thermal cameras that easily fit in a pocket that are based on nothing any more powerful than an ESP32, it does tend to simplify the development process dramatically to include Linux and a little more processing power if you can.

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Your Own Engineering Workstation, With Mame

July 28, 2022 by 19 Comments

There are some things that leave indelible impressions in your memory. One of those things, for me, was a technical presentation in 1980 I attended — by calling in a lot of favors — a presentation by HP at what is now the Stennis Space Center. I was a student and it took a few phone calls to wrangle an invite but I wound up in a state-of-the-art conference room with a bunch of NASA engineers watching HP tell us about all their latest and greatest. Not that I could afford any of it, mind you. What really caught my imagination that day was the HP9845C, a color graphics computer with a roughly $40,000 price tag. That was twice the average US salary for 1980. Now, of course, you have a much better computer — or, rather, you probably have several much better computers including your phone. But if you want to relive those days, you can actually recreate the HP9845C’s 1980-vintage graphics glory using, of all things, a game emulator.

The Machine

The HP9845C with a Colorful Soft Key Display

Keep in mind that the IBM PC was nearly two years away at this point and, even then, wouldn’t hold a candle to the HP9845C. Like many machines of its era, it ran BASIC natively — in fact, it used special microcode to run BASIC programs relatively quickly on its 16-bit 5.7 MHz CPU. The 560 x 455 pixel graphics system had its own CPU and you could max it out with a decadent 1.5 MB of RAM. (But not, alas, for $40,000 which got you — I think –128K or so.)

The widespread use of the computer mouse was still in the future, so the HP had that wonderful light pen. Mass storage was also no problem — there was a 217 kB tape drive and while earlier models had a second drive and a thermal printer optional, these were included in the color “C” model. Like HP calculators, you could slot in different ROMs for different purposes. There were other options such as a digitizer and even floppy discs.

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About As Cold As It Gets: The Webb Telescope’s Cryocooler

May 5, 2022 by 26 Comments

If you were asked to name the coldest spot in the solar system, chances are pretty good you’d think it would be somewhere as far as possible from the ultimate source of all the system’s energy — the Sun. It stands to reason that the further away you get from something hot, the more the heat spreads out. And so Pluto, planet or not, might be a good guess for the record low temperature.

But, for as cold as Pluto gets — down to 40 Kelvin — there’s a place that much, much colder than that, and paradoxically, much closer to home. In fact, it’s only about a million miles away, and right now, sitting at a mere 6 Kelvin, the chunk of silicon at the focal plane of one of the main instruments aboard the James Webb Space telescope makes the surface of Pluto look downright balmy.

The depth of cold on Webb is all the more amazing given that mere meters away, the temperature is a sizzling 324 K (123 F, 51 C). The hows and whys of Webb’s cooling systems are chock full of interesting engineering tidbits and worth an in-depth look as the world’s newest space telescope gears up for observations.

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