Hubble is back
nasa.gov
nasa.gov
They were able to recover the failed backup gyroscope by executing a series of attitude maneuvers while switching between operational modes on the gyro.
They literally shook the spacecraft and turned the gyro off-and-on.
Sometimes you gotta bang on something to get it to work!
I would love to buy a beer for the mission operations team member who came up with that idea!
setTimeout(function() { ... setTimeout(function() { ... }, Math.random() 1000); }, Math.random() 1000);
// winning!
Or its siblings, including https://github.com/mattdiamond/fuckitjs
edit: I have to add, i just found out about the extent of the definition.
>make a malfunctioning device or person work.
If you want to know how an unknown system reacts, first thing you do is to hit it hard.
What he meant was that applying the Heaviside function to the inputs of a system to determine the step response [1] is one of the first things we should do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_response
(Actually, our control classes told us to do both to get a basic view of a system.)
They know the gyros will eventually give out and they have contingency plans around what kinds of science they can continue to do even when they're down to 1 gyro.
Very impressive. I'm always discouraged hearing people say NASA is wasting money and science and that's just not true IMHO.
In the Netherlands they have outsourced the organisation and managment of health care to the doctors themselves (roughly speaking). It is often cited as one of the main reasons the Netherlands rank #1 in health care ratings over the years.
It's also important to note that the number of medical schools isn't really artificially limited by the LCME, as they will accredit most any medical school that meets the accreditation standards.
On top of that, medical students in the US have to undergo a residency before becoming fully licensed physicians. These residencies are accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), a separate organization.
However, while the ACGME can accredit these programs, the majority of funding for training resident physicians comes from the federal government (department of health and human services, center for medicare and medicaid services), and is capped by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 (modified in 1999 to accommodate the rural physician shortage). Today, this costs the federal government around $11 billion each year for all of the residents in the country.
The real question, then, is who we can point to as the bottleneck for new doctors in this country. I found this article enlightening, but it may be behind a paywall:
And the idea that an industry as profitable as medicine needs the taxpayer to fund its training is preposterous. This is just a deflection from the AMA's role.
Most doctors already come from wealthy families (specifically, they have doctor parents) because in addition to the tuition of medical school, there are a variety of other expenses (board examination fees, the undergraduate requirement, interview expenses for both medical school and residency) that are difficult to fund without assistance. Also, compensation for physicians is not what you seem to think it is outside of subspecialized fields, and the expense of medical school (and the opportunity cost of residency) means that physician shortages in the general disciplines will only continue to get worse as medical students realize the only way they can pay back their loans is to subspecialize.
Also, medical schools are primarily limited by number of faculty, and it's difficult to find doctors for med school faculty roles... because they're so poorly compensated in comparison to other opportunities.
If you want more doctors, first provide incentives for doctors to teach, then provide funding for those who normally don't see medical school as an available opportunity, then incentivize people to go into general disciplines, then properly compensate residents so they're not throwing away ten years of potential income, then complain about how "doctors are overpaid but there's also a big shortage of them".
I agree that the undergrad requirement is absurd. But it is also just another part of the system that increases entry-barriers and leads to all of these problems, but makes the field more lucrative for a big segment of those who get through it.
The rest of us have to compete in a free market for our skills. Why not doctors?
Not sure why you got downvoted. The Lansley Reforms - where Primary Care Trusts were abolished and replaced by Clinical Commissioning Groups which are run by GPs and are responsible for commissioning most of the NHS services (about 2/3 of the budget) - are known to have caused severe disruption to English NHS services.
[0] https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2018/10/slotervaart-hospital-s...
That has a far higher outcome on healthcare than taking doctors away from patients to run hospitals.
pareto -- 80% of work done by 20% of workers.
there's also some other law about the work being done by the square root of the total workers.
I’ve personally worked at large private firms where incompetent folks coasted for decades.
When management’s clout is measured in headcount, you get this (whether in the private or public sector)
That it since followed the path of every other monopoly bureaucracy was of course unavoidable.
This is not really true, but you are taking it as axiomatic.
Even though SpaceX has to do some of this, they get to reuse quite a bit of NASA paperwork.
But regardless recording it would likely be helpful as most problems in engineerings seem to recur over time in different and new contexts.
Kids need to see the previous generation has set extraordinary goals to inspire them to set their own goals. What could be more inspiring than a middle school student seeing Hubble launch, being inspired to study and then after college get to participate in what inspired them in the first place.
http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/team_hubble/#hubbletime
Each year astronomers from dozens of countries vie for precious minutes of Hubble's unrivaled view of the cosmos.
A review committee made up of experts from the astronomical community determines which proposed observations address pressing scientific questions and make the best use of the telescope's capabilities.
Each year more than 1,000 proposals are reviewed and approximately 200 are selected, which represents roughly 20,000 individual observations.
I feel bad for all the projects that got delayed. I wonder if they'll be rescheduled, or have to be resubmitted or are just out of luck.
NASA has plans to maybe use one of them sometime, but because of how expensive the James Webb Telescope turned out to be doesn't have money to do anything with the second.
The wikipedia article gives some more context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
Also, overall there isn't a huge advantage to this hardware. It doesn't save much money as most of the cost of the telescopes is in the other components: the spacecraft parts (including the attitude control system which as we've seen with Hubble is quite important) and the instruments. The biggest advantage to the NRO gifts (the NSA doesn't have telescopes, that we know of) is not that they make building space telescopes cheaper but that they mainly just make those missions more likely to be funded.
On the other hand, I remembered that hubble was manually repaired by astronauts mutliple times back in the space shuttle era. I'm wondering that, do we have capabilities to perform in-space non-ISS-kind repairs now? Soyuz may be able to do in-space rendezvous but cargo space is limited. Soyuz+Progress composition (may be too complicated)?
However that mission will unlikely be possible for both technical and political reasons.
It's conceivable that a repair mission might be possible with the soon to come into service US crew capsules (Dragon 2 and Starliner) since the rockets that launch them have more performance than the Soyuz, but even then it would be a pretty ambitious mission.
- some NASA scientists, probably
And here I am on Earth, barely capable of debugging JavaScript code.
If as much education was required of software engineers as it is from people who work on the Hubble telescope then you wouldn't have any troubles debugging JavaScript.
I don't think there's any other language with as many independent production-quality implementations.
In what way do you think it could be better specified?
Obviously such measures would be very much impractical outside of NASA.
But also surgeons make misstakes. Lots of them. Or don't find the perfect solution in time, needed to save someones live.
Government can be better, and I hope we can make it better too.
What else to say? I love a good NASA win, geek, nerd, engineering story.
nasa.gov's accessibility is absolutely terrible for a government website.