Roman Telescope Saves Fuel, Doubles Mission

September 30, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 11 Comments

Contemplate the events that might end a space mission, and you might picture something dramatic: detonation on the pad, a dead guidance system, or micrometeoroids shattering delicate solar panels. More often, though, the ending is far more mundane. Plenty of perfectly healthy spacecraft have been retired simply because the fuel tanks ran dry. That’s why mission planners guard every kilogram of go juice so jealously, and why careful preparation in a mission is critical to long-term success.

Which brings us to NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Barely two weeks after its August 30 launch on a Falcon Heavy, the mission team announced that Roman now has enough fuel for at least 22 years of science operations. That’s well over double its original 10-year fuel budget. It’s a huge gain, so let’s explore how NASA pulled it off.

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Geothermal Cooling For New York’s Subways

September 29, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 21 Comments

You might think that if you dug some tunnels down into the ground where you could be out of the sunshine, that you might find them to be relatively cool and comfortable inside. Yet, fill those tunnels with trains and supporting equipment and millions of commuters, and you’ll instead find yourself sweltering in the heat.

New York’s subways are too hot for comfort, and have been for some time. Unfortunately, unlike any old regular building, you can’t just air condition a subway and call it done. Instead, authorities are looking for other solutions to beat the heat on the famous underground transit network.

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Places To Visit: Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord

September 28, 2026 by Jenny List 18 Comments

There are many benefits to spending time in the park, but perhaps few of them have a Hackaday angle. There’s a park in Germany you might want to make an exception for, and it lies in the Ruhrpott city of Duisburg.

I was lucky enough last month to join a friend as she toured Germany for the first time with a caravan. It’s a large country with many beautiful places, so her choice might seem unexpected at first sight. The Ruhrpott, or Ruhr area, is a loose conurbation of industrial cities that loosely follows the river Ruhr on its trip to the Rhine on the western edge of the country. It’s close to deposits of coal and iron ore, so just like similar areas in other countries, it became a centre for heavy industry. Today that continues, but as you might expect it’s also dotted with the remains of former industries. It’s one of those which is our subject for today, and it offers a very unusual opportunity.

A view out over a wooded post industrial landscape against a grey cloudy sky. In the foreground is a hiuge traverser crane. — Looking out over the former ore bunkers shows just how huge this site is.

Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord is a forest park on the northern side of the city of Duisburg. But of course that’s not the whole story, because until 1985 it was the site of the Thyssen ironworks. In rehabilitating the site they chose to keep the main structures of the ironworks intact as they reclaimed the surrounding polluted industrial land, so today it may be one of the few places in the world where you can free of charge get up-close and personal with a fully-intact and preserved blast furnace. The site has three of them remaining along with their associated ore and gas processing plants, and the largest and newest, blast furnace number 5, is a structure you can climb to its top. If you’ve ever been curious about iron smelting, this is the place to come. Continue reading “Places To Visit: Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord” →

The FPGA Chronicles: Exploring The Tang Nano 20K

September 28, 2026 by Al Williams 36 Comments

FPGAs used to be mysterious, expensive devices, but these days you can buy surprisingly capable boards for very little money. Some years ago, I did an FPGA Bootcamp over on Hackaday.io. Much of that material still applies, but the hardware is dated. So I decided it was time to update it, using the inexpensive Tang Nano 20K and its GOWIN GW2AR-18 FPGA as the main platform, with perhaps a few excursions into other FPGAs.

History and Motivation

Once upon a time, if you wanted to have a custom IC, you went with a wheelbarrow full of money to a semiconductor company. However, some smart person at a semiconductor fab eventually realized they could make a chip with a lot of uncommitted blocks on it and then, for a custom chip, only design the wiring that connected them together. This still required a wheelbarrow full of money, but it was a smaller wheelbarrow.

Then one day, someone realized they could do the same thing but make the electrical connections between the blocks configurable. Maybe have fuses you can blow, or use EEPROM or RAM cells to remember which blocks are connected to which. It is complicated, sure, but then you can make many of these chips and sell them to people who could, in theory, make their own custom chips without your help.

When do you need an FPGA? A classic classroom exercise for an FPGA, for example, is a traffic light because it shows off how to do state machines, which are important for some kinds of FPGA designs. But other than as a learning example, why would you do this? Even a simple 8-bit CPU can handle a traffic light.

Suppose instead that you have hundreds of digital sensors on a rocket, and any one of them must raise an alarm within a few microseconds. A processor has to sample inputs in groups, service interrupts, or rely on extra hardware. An FPGA can simply implement the equivalent of one enormous OR gate. It watches every input continuously, and unrelated logic elsewhere in the FPGA does not steal execution time from it. Can you do it with a microcontroller? Probably, but not easily. For some classes of problems, an FPGA is the better answer.

Of course, you can also build a CPU on your FPGA and some FPGAs have CPUs in the same package. This is often a sweet spot because then things that are easy to do in software, you do in software. Things that are easier to do in hardware, you do in the FPGA.

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Hackaday Links: September 27, 2026

September 27, 2026 by Al Williams 7 Comments

It isn’t quite hailing frequencies open, but researchers from Harvard claim they’ve picked up a radio signal directly from a nearby exoplanet. Before you get too excited, planets in our solar system also emit RF, so no one credible is claiming these are extraterrestrial reruns of their version of I Love Lucy, but it is the first time they’ve localized a radio signal to an exoplanet, in this case, Beta Pictoris B.

Speaking of space, the asteroid formerly known as 1981 EC26 is now sporting a new moniker: (14331) Alyankovic. If you think that sounds like (Weird) Al Yankovic, you aren’t wrong. The Tucson Star reports that, thanks to the efforts of several planetary scientists who are also Weird Al fans, the International Astronomical Union made the name official. Apparently, another asteroid now bears a name in honor of Weird Al’s predecessor, Tom Lehrer.

If you follow open mobile phone software, you probably know the name postmarketOS, a Linux distribution based on Alpine aimed at mobile phones and tablets. Well, now you can forget it. The project announced a name change, so we’re now talking about Nura. Why Nura? According to the team, it is a shortened form of Nuraghe, some granite structures in Sardinia that are over 5,000 years old. The FAQ mentions that postmarketOS was hard to remember. We aren’t sure Nura is that much more memorable. Perhaps they should have pivoted to Phonz OS.

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UDP Broadcasting And The Brave New World Of IPv6

September 24, 2026 by Maya Posch 49 Comments

After recently working our way through UDP broadcasting and network subnetting all in the comfort zone of IPv4, it’s time to address the elephant in the room, the one wearing a bright neon ‘IPv6’ sign. Although it’s still very much a rumor at this point, supposedly IPv6 is slated to replace the venerable IPv4 protocol. Rather than just being IPv4-but-with-more-addresses, its designers took the opportunity to basically completely redesign the protocol for the futuristic world of the late 90s and the early 2000s.

Joking aside, IPv6 having been introduced in 1995 and still struggling to meaningfully displace IPv4 does invite some worries about just how easy it is to switch between these two fundamental internet protocols. Say if we wanted to join the future of the 2000s and adapt our software to speak IPv6 instead of IPv4, what would change about the aforementioned aspects of IPv4 UDP broadcasting and IPv4 subnetting?

Speaking as an ignorant developer who mostly knows IPv6 from those weird and hard to remember network addresses, as well as many broken router implementations, I’m not entirely convinced that I’m going to like what I’ll see.

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After Decades, NASA May Finally Replace Mars Relays

September 24, 2026 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

We’ve yet to find any definitive evidence that there’s biological life on present-day Mars, but to say it’s a dead planet isn’t exactly accurate. Since the first Viking lander touched down in 1976, a revolving cast of humanity’s robotic envoys have worked on and around the Red Planet — and as access to space becomes cheaper and more routine, the mechatronic population of Mars will continue to grow.

Given the number of landers, rovers, and orbiting spacecraft that have been sent to study Mars over the last 50 years, you might be surprised to find that the communications systems in place to transmit all that critical scientific data back to Earth aren’t nearly as robust as you’d think. While it’s understandable that the first craft to arrive at Mars had to operate in isolation, even the flagship Perseverance and Curiosity rovers carry their own high-gain radio systems so they can communicate directly with Earth. Given the incredible premium put on the mass of an interplanetary craft, each mission that needs to bring along its own link back to Earth effectively reduces its payload of much scientific equipment.

It’s not that satellites in orbit around the planet aren’t used to relay signals between Martian ground assets and their controllers back on Earth. In fact these relay links are used extensively for bandwidth-intensive tasks such as image transfers. But it’s also true that the craft currently available to act as intermediaries between the two planets aren’t terribly well suited to the task. The current fleet of Mars orbiters were conceived primary as research vehicles, and so every decision regarding their design and positioning around the planet was made with that goal in mind. What relatively limited capability they do have as communication relays is further hindered by the age of their hardware.

But after decades of false starts and shifting budgets, NASA is closer than ever to finally establishing the Mars Telecommunications Network, a dedicated high-bandwidth communication relay that will ensure current and future missions always have a way to phone home.