jwst

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Hackaday Links: May 25, 2025

May 25, 2025 by 24 Comments

Have you heard that author Andy Weir has a new book coming out? Very exciting, we know, and according to a syndicated reading list for Summer 2025, it’s called The Last Algorithm, and it’s a tale of a programmer who discovers a dark and dangerous secret about artificial intelligence. If that seems a little out of sync with his usual space-hacking fare such as The Martian and Project Hail Mary, that’s because the book doesn’t exist, and neither do most of the other books on the list.

The list was published in a 64-page supplement that ran in major US newspapers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The feature listed fifteen must-read books, only five of which exist, and it’s no surprise that AI is to behind the muck-up. Writer Marco Buscaglia took the blame, saying that he used an LLM to produce the list without checking the results. Nobody else in the editorial chain appears to have reviewed the list either, resulting in the hallucination getting published. Readers are understandably upset about this, but for our part, we’re just bummed that Andy doesn’t have a new book coming out.

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Hackaday Links: May 11, 2025

May 11, 2025 by 6 Comments

Did artificial intelligence just jump the shark? Maybe so, and it came from the legal world of all places, with this report of an AI-generated victim impact statement. In an apparent first, the family of an Arizona man killed in a road rage incident in 2021 used AI to bring the victim back to life to testify during the sentencing phase of his killer’s trial. The video was created by the sister and brother-in-law of the 37-year-old victim using old photos and videos, and was quite well done, despite the normal uncanny valley stuff around lip-syncing that seems to be the fatal flaw for every deep-fake video we’ve seen so far. The victim’s beard is also strangely immobile, which we found off-putting.

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Hackaday Links: April 20, 2025

April 20, 2025 by 8 Comments

We appear to be edging ever closer to a solid statement of “We are not alone” in the universe with this week’s announcement of the detection of biosignatures in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b. The planet, which is 124 light-years away, has been the focus of much attention since it was discovered in 2015 using the Kepler space telescope because it lies in the habitable zone around its red-dwarf star. Initial observations with Hubble indicated the presence of water vapor, and follow-up investigations using the James Webb Space Telescope detected all sorts of goodies in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide and methane. But more recently, JWST saw signs of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), organic molecules which, on Earth, are strongly associated with biological processes in marine bacteria and phytoplankton.

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NASA Taps Webb To Help Study 2032 Asteroid Threat

February 13, 2025 by 43 Comments

In all likelihood, asteroid 2024 YR4 will slip silently past the Earth. Based on the data we have so far, there’s an estimated chance of only 2.1% to 2.3% that it will collide with the planet on December 22nd, 2032. Under normal circumstances, if somebody told you there was a roughly 98% chance of something not happening, you probably wouldn’t give it a second thought. There’s certainly a case to be made that you should feel that way in regards to this particular event — frankly, it’s a lot more likely that some other terrible thing is going to happen to you in the next eight years than it is an asteroid is going to ruin your Christmas party.

That being said, when you consider the scale of the cosmos, a 2+% chance of getting hit is enough to raise some eyebrows. After all, it’s the highest likelihood of an asteroid impact that we’re currently aware of. It’s also troubling that the number has only gone up as further observations of 2024 YR4’s orbit have been made; a few weeks ago, the impact probability was just 1%. Accordingly, NASA has recently announced they’ll be making time in the James Webb Space Telescope’s busy scientific schedule to observe the asteroid next month.

So keeping in mind that we’re still talking about an event that’s statistically unlikely to actually occur, let’s take a look at what we know about 2024 YR4, and how further study and analysis can give us a better idea of what kind of threat we’re dealing with.

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The Constant Monitoring And Work That Goes Into JWST’s Optics

November 11, 2024 by No comments

The James Webb Space Telescope’s array of eighteen hexagonal mirrors went through an intricate (and lengthy) alignment and calibration process before it could begin its mission — but the process is far from being a one-and-done. Keeping the telescope aligned and performing optimally requires constant work from its own team dedicated to the purpose.

Alignment of the optical elements in JWST are so fine, and the tool is so sensitive, that even small temperature variations have an effect on results. For about twenty minutes every other day, the monitoring program uses a set of lenses that intentionally de-focus images of stars by a known amount. These distortions contain measurable features that the team uses to build a profile of changes over time. Each of the mirror segments is also checked by being imaged selfie-style every three months.

This work and maintenance plan pays off. The team has made over 25 corrections since its mission began, and JWST’s optics continue to exceed specifications. The increased performance has direct payoffs in that better data can be gathered from faint celestial objects.

JWST was fantastically ambitious and is extremely successful, and as a science instrument it is jam-packed with amazing bits, not least of which are the actuators responsible for adjusting the mirrors.

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Hackaday Links: July 2, 2023

July 2, 2023 by 21 Comments

Members of Pixelbar woke up to shocking news on Wednesday morning this week as they learned that a fire had destroyed the building housing their Rotterdam hackerspace. Pictures of the fire are pretty dramatic and show the entire building ablaze. We’re not familiar with Pixelbar specifically, but most hackerspaces seem to share space with other businesses in repurposed warehouses and other industrial buildings, and it looks like that was the case here. Local coverage doesn’t indicate that a cause has been determined, but they do say that “large batches of wood” were stored in or near the structure, which likely contributed to the dramatic display. There don’t seem to be reports of injuries to civilians or first responders, so that’s a blessing, but Pixelbar seems to have been completely destroyed. If you’re in a position to help, check out their GoFundMe page. As our own Jenny List, who currently lives in The Netherlands, points out, spaces suitable for housing a hackerspace are hard to come by in a city like Rotterdam, which is the busiest port in Europe. That means Pixelbar members will be competing for space with businesses that have far deeper pockets, so anything you can donate will likely go a long way toward rebuilding.

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Hackaday Links: March 26, 2023

March 26, 2023 by 3 Comments

Sad news in the tech world this week as Intel co-founder Gordon Moore passed away in Hawaii at the age of 94. Along with Robert Noyce in 1968, Moore founded NM Electronics, the company that would later go on to become Intel Corporation and give the world the first commercially available microprocessor, the 4004, in 1971. The four-bit microprocessor would be joined a few years later by the 8008 and 8080, chips that paved the way for the PC revolution to come. Surprisingly, Moore was not an electrical engineer but a chemist, earning his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1954 before his postdoctoral research at the prestigious Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins. He briefly worked alongside Nobel laureate and transistor co-inventor William Shockley before jumping ship with Noyce and others to found Fairchild Semiconductor, which is where he made the observation that integrated circuit component density doubled roughly every two years. This calculation would go on to be known as “Moore’s Law.”

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