Chandra X-ray Observatory Threatened By Budget Cuts

April 10, 2024 by Tom Nardi 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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How DEC’s LANBridge 100 Gave Ethernet A Fighting Chance

April 9, 2024 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

Alan Kirby (left) and Mark Kempf with the LANBridge 100, serial number 0001. (Credit: Alan Kirby)

When Ethernet was originally envisioned, it would use a common, shared medium (the ‘Ether’ part), with transmitting and collision resolution handled by the carrier sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD) method. While effective and cheap, this limited Ethernet to a 1.5 km cable run and 10 Mb/s transfer rate. As [Alan Kirby] worked at Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) in the 1980s and 1990s, he saw how competing network technologies including Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) – that DEC also worked on – threatened to extinguish Ethernet despite these alternatives being more expensive. The solution here would be store-and-forward switching, [Alan] figured.

After teaming up with Mark Kempf, both engineers managed to convince DEC management to give them a chance to develop such a switch for Ethernet, which turned into the LANBridge 100. As a so-called ‘learning bridge’, it operated on Layer 2 of the network stack, learning the MAC addresses of the connected systems and forwarding only those packets that were relevant for the other network. This instantly prevented collisions between thus connected networks, allowed for long (fiber) runs between bridges and would be the beginning of the transformation of Ethernet as a shared medium (like WiFi today) into a star topology network, with each connected system getting its very own Ethernet cable to a dedicated switch port.

Double-Checking NASA’s Eclipse Estimate At Home

April 9, 2024 by Tom Nardi 26 Comments

If you were lucky enough to be near the path of totality, and didn’t have your view obscured by clouds, yesterday’s eclipse provided some very memorable views. But you know what’s even better than making memories? Having cold hard data to back it up.

Hackaday contributor [Bob Baddeley] was in Madison, Wisconsin for the big event, which NASA’s Eclipse Explorer website predicted would see about 87% coverage. Watching the eclipse through the appropriate gear at the local hackerspace was fun, but the real nerding out happened when he got home and could pull the data from his solar system.

A graph of the system’s generated power shows a very clear dip during the duration of the eclipse, which let him determine exactly when the occlusion started, peaked, and ended.

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The Rise And Fall Of Silicon Graphics

April 8, 2024 by Maya Posch 55 Comments

Maybe best known as the company which brought a splash of color to corporate and scientific computing with its Indigo range of computer systems, Silicon Graphics Inc. (later SGI) burst onto the market in 1981 with what was effectively one of the first commercial graphics operations accelerator with the Geometry Engine. SGI’s founder – James Henry Clark was quite possibly as colorful a character as the company’s products, with [Bradford Morgan White] covering the years leading up to SGI’s founding, its highlights and its eventual demise in 2009.

The story of SGI is typical of a start-up that sees itself become the market leader for years, even as this market gradually changes. For SGI it was the surge in commodity 3D graphics cards in the 1990s alongside affordable (and cluster-capable; insert Beowulf cluster jokes here) server hardware that posed a major problem. Eventually it’d start offering Windows NT workstations, drop its MIPS-based systems in a shift to Intel’s disastrous Itanium range of CPUs and fall to the last-ditch effort of any struggling company: a logo change.

None of this was effective, naturally, and ultimately SGI would file (again) for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009, with Rackable Systems snapping up its assets and renaming itself to SGI, before getting bought out by HPE and sunsetting SGI as a brand name.

Heating Mars On The Cheap

April 8, 2024 by Lewin Day 78 Comments

Mars is fairly attractive as a potential future home for humanity. It’s solid, with firm land underfoot. It’s able to hang on to a little atmosphere, which is more than you can say about the moon. It’s even got a day/night cycle remarkably close to our own. The only problem is it’s too darn cold, and there’s not a lot of oxygen to breathe, either.

Terraforming is the concept of fixing problems like these on a planet-wide scale. Forget living in domes—let’s just make the whole thing habitable!

That’s a huge task, so much current work involves exploring just what we could achieve with today’s technology. In the case of Mars, [Casey Handmer] doesn’t have a plan to terraform the whole planet. But he does suggest we could potentially achieve significant warming of the Red Planet for $10 billion in just 10 years. Continue reading “Heating Mars On The Cheap” →

How To Properly Patch Your Iowa-Class Battleship

April 6, 2024 by Tom Nardi 28 Comments

There’s a saying among recreational mariners that the word “boat” is actually an acronym for “bring out another thousand”, as it seems you can’t operate one for long without committing to expensive maintenance and repairs. But this axiom isn’t limited to just civilian pleasure craft, it also holds true for large and complex vessels — although the bill generally has a few more zeros at the end.

Consider the USS New Jersey (BB-62), an Iowa-class battleship that first served in the Second World War and is now operated as a museum ship. Its recent dry docking for routine repair work has been extensively documented on YouTube by curator [Ryan Szimanski], and in the latest video, he covers one of the most important tasks crews have to attend to while the ship is out of the water: inspecting and repairing the hundreds of patches that line the hull.

These patches aren’t to repair damage, but instead cover up the various water inlets and outlets required by onboard systems. When New Jersey was finally decommissioned in 1991, it was hauled out of the water and plates were welded over all of these access points to prevent any potential leaks. But as the Navy wanted to preserve the ship so it could potentially be reactivated if necessary, care was taken to make the process reversible.

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Fictional Computers: The Three Body Problem

April 5, 2024 by Al Williams 54 Comments

If you intend to see the Netflix series “The Three Body Problem” or you want to read the Hugo-winning story from Chinese author [Cixin Liu], then you should probably bookmark this post and stop reading immediately. There will be some mild spoilers. You have been warned.

While the show does have some moments that will make your science brain cringe, there is one scene that shows a computer that could actually be built. Would it be practical? Probably not in real life, but in the context provided by the show, it was perfectly feasible. It could have, however, been done a little better, but the idea was — like many great ideas — both deceptively simple and amazingly profound. The computer was made of human beings. I’m not talking like Dune’s mentats — humans with super brains augmented by drugs or technology. This is something very different.

Background

This is your last chance. There are spoilers ahead, although I’ll try to leave out as much as I can. In the story, top scientists receive a mysterious headset that allows them to experience totally immersive holodeck-style virtual reality. When they put the headset on, they are in what appears to be a game. The game puts you in a historical location — the court of Henry VIII or Ghengis Kahn. However, this Earth has three suns. The planet is sometimes in a nicely habitable zone and sometimes is not. The periods when the planet is uninhabitable might have everything bursting into flames or freezing, or there might not be sufficient gravity to hold them on the planet’s surface. (Although I’ll admit, I found that one hard to grasp.)

Apparently, the inhabitants of this quasi-Earth can hibernate through the “chaotic eras” and wait for the next “stable era” that lasts a long time. The problem, as you probably know, is that there is no general closed-form solution for the three-body problem. Of course, there are approximations and special cases, but it isn’t easy to make long-term predictions about the state of three bodies, even with modern computers.

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