Communication with Hayabusa2 is via radio waves that are transmitted and received by large antenna at ground stations on Earth. Our website “Haya2NOW” shows these communications in real time.
I'm assuming live telemetry from a satellite. The part I was curious about is, in the message emulator, sending the message seems to take a really long time for a round trip. So it looks like it must be pretty far away from Earth.
Little search shows that that it's a probe sent to an asteroid to collect samples and bring them back to Earth. It was sent in 2014, arrived this year, and will fly back in 2019 and arrive in 2020.
EDIT: Looks like it just landed on the asteroid, hence this being posted [0]
This is awesome. One change I would make is click once on something to launch its description, click anywhere to close. Then the screen is free to select the next description on another item.
I was looking at the rise and set times for each ground station, looking to see which one would take over once the spacecraft dropped out of view of Goldstone. I noticed that each one shows local time, not GMT. Without looking it up, I have no idea which zone these various places are in so I find that display quite confusing. I hope the spacecraft controller's display isn't like that.
Even if the controller has more training, if he has to do mental calculations instead of reading directly from the screen there will be more chance for errors to occur and it will put a higher cognitive load on the controller.
Does he really have to do a lot of mental calculations, or does he just have to remember that "the satellite as it is currently positioned comes into view of my friend Bob's observatory in Canberra an hour and 15 before he goes home for the day, at 3:45PM local time... and with the way we are moving in relation to each other, it has been coming into view approximately 36 seconds earlier each day that passes."
I understand the sentiment, but the format of this reply is dangerous. It leads to a spiral of negativity and personal attacks. "Two wrongs don't make a right" and all that.
If possible, I'd like to request the assumption of good faith. Hey, at the end of the day, maybe they do know what they're talking about, no? :) Could be an ex Japanese astronaut!
In the bottom it says “Deep Space Center”. What would be the definition of deep space, considering we are no where close to doing anything with deep space for my definition besides observing it.
In this context, deep space is anything not in earth orbit. JPL, for instance, runs the Deep Space Network, which is used to communicate with the Mars rovers, spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, etc. as opposed to the NASA TDRS network which is used to communicate with earth-orbiting satellites.
There are various, competing technical definitions of “deep space” — the ITU defines it as more than 2 million kilometers from earth — but the Deep Space Network, and similar networks operated by other countries, are typically used to communicate with interplanetary spacecraft, and are effective basically anywhere higher than geosynchronous orbit (26,000 miles/42,000 km).
The "jumps" are intended to be gentle enough that they won't leave Ryugu's gravity well. For that, you just need to know Ryugu's mass; they had a good guess of that before the mission started, and a much better idea of it now.
It can be pretty random what gets traction on HN. That's why we explicitly allow a few reposts (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and why we do things like the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380). Eventually we want to add some kind of karma sharing so earlier submitters don't get left out when a later submission takes off. In the meantime, though, it evens out in the long run, so please keep posting good stories!
I'd love to use a modern GUI that adopted this aesthetic. Even though the content of documents would be in color, having the UI itself restrained to a simple monochrome palette would be very enjoyable to use.
Another great part of this particular interface is also minimal cruft. All you have is data text, descriptive text, and a bunch of small graphics, all but one meaningful (the sine wave representing communication seems to be just a gimmick, though it still carries a few bits of relevant information). No useless animations, no useless framing, no "material design", no nonsense.
I'm of firm belief that the principle of proximity is primary for UI design, and color is far below. IMO the recent slew of the ‘anti-bullshit’ “This is a website” pages didn't come close to Matthew Butterick's online-book “Practical Typography,” which is exquisite simply from using carefully chosen margins and fonts: https://practicaltypography.com/
I'm not really ready to show people, but my 'modern' (conversation-driven) GUI is rocking the monochrome.
( edit: oh, with dark and light themes! )
Fuck it. Slater is magic software...
and it's interface is like a tiling 'window manager' for any number of screens (anything with a browser), for threads of interaction, that are modeled as a story, like a conversation... but composes natural language with rich controls, forms, and stateful widgets. and super monochrome... but also controls your browser and TV and stuff...
I'm really inspired by the design work on the LightPhone 2, btw.
I'll watch in a minute, because I luuuuurv fantasy interfaces... but nope. I'm not really imitating anything here; just keeping it minimal.
I'll probably throw away the waveform. I'm just looking for ways to use the audio to pace the text output, and also to tie the speech and text together as much as possible, so there's never a gap between them for your focus to jump between.
Maybe you'll have more success with this idea than I have (way too many other things in the way sadly): something that may be fairly nontrivial but very cool to solve would be breaking words down into syllables, identifying the syllable boundaries in the speech (... xD), and then synchronizing the display on each syllable as it's presented.
How are you synchronizing to each word?
I wonder if Google would consider expanding their TTS a bit to provide syllable data and other rich breakdown information.
I'm using Polly for the moment, and it provides word and viseme boundaries. Enough to animate face poses. I'm not taking full advantage of the visemes here: it's only affecting the saturation of the waveform color. Too subtle to notice, with the way things kind of flicker with this one.
I have other ideas I want to play with, but don't really have time, and I may just have to drop that line of thinking, because I plan to move to one of the wavenet implementations, which don't provide speech marks data.
I didn't know that could be done. I've never even opened up the Accessibility panel. Actually, grayscale is not too bad. Everything is sharp and the contrast is high. However, I think I'll keep things in color anyway.
Alas, third-party apps—and of course websites—aren't made to be converted to grayscale. This can be easily seen by comparing custom-made monochrome icons in the menu bar to grayed icons in the dock and third-party toolbars (e.g. browser addons).
fluxbox, awesome or any other tiling windows manager plus conky can be very near to this interface. Of course, that's just the windowing system and not the GUI itself.
How can I build something like this? Is this just CSS what makes difference. Reference to a guide or source is very much appreciated. This is really cool. Thank you.
Yes it’s just css. The hard part is deciding what colours things should be. How thick to make the borders, and when to add them. What sizes and colours and fonts for the different bits of text. How to lay it out.
This sort of design fits nicely into css and html without much hackery but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to design.
I suppose you could view source or inspect element.
I’m really sad that UI and backend are so tightly coupled usually... like, not a lot of value is in the UI (except for ads of course), and many web software and especially desktop software could just supply an API along with an open source, adaptable GUI that users could freely modify and adapt (or download/buy other themes).
The old mIRC was mostly like this, a core/backend functionality with a very skin-able frontend.
> not a lot of value is in the UI (except for ads of course)
Almost all the value is in the UI. For the user, it's the place where they interact with the system, and in software tools, UI design can make orders of magnitude of difference in value delivered to the user[0]. For the vendor, the UI is where they shove ads at people, track them, and lock them into the product.
The problem is that Internet companies today no longer operate under "earn money by delivering value" model. They operate under "extract as much value as possible from the customer", which means any value delivered is incidental. Examples of those two models in action:
- "earn money by delivering value" - customizable interface with power-user features, and/or good API allowing users to interact with the product from third-party UIs and scripts; users pay for the product/service
- "extract value from user" - dumbed down, shiny interface, no power-user featuers; locked down SaaS little to no API access; sometimes paid, but more likely free in order to maximize user growth, which leads directly to the company being acquihired, product being shut down, and users being left in the cold
(Yes, I'm pretty bitter about the state of things, and I generally refuse to use most SaaS products because of the dominant approach of such companies.)
--
[0] - as a real-world example, consider software for managing products in ecommerce. Take away batch-processing capabilities, and your user's productivity will drop hundredfold. Which directly translates to a) frustration, and b) the need to hire more people for the same task.
These kinds of GUIs bother me so much. While they're bedazzling to look at, say in a sci-fi movie, they are horrendously designed in terms of functionality, user experience and ability to convey clearly/concisely with the least amount of ambiguity.
It bothers me that people are drawn to it like flies and you see this type of thing everywhere in "Futuristic" projections of our life.
They're objectively worse, yet they look cool and the general public values "Coolness" over GUI's ability to meet its core purpose - that is to leverage human vision's bandwidth to convey information rapidly, concisely and without ambiguity. That is the whole point of a GUI.
I could write a long essay criticizing the obvious drawbacks of this type of implementation. For example, contrast is non-existent. There is just so much stuff that's wrong, I am overwhelmed as I respond.
Please do. Because personally, contrast is about the only thing that irks me about this; beyond that, I believe it's a very decent dashboard, with a bit of intentional futuristic style, but otherwise close to zero useless bullshit that plagues the UI fashion of today.
Disagree. The UI is nearly identical to our modern UIs, from an information and functionality point of view. The sole difference in this case appears to be style. Fonts and colors, mostly.
Your critique would be true when leveled at the font choice, though.
Spacecraft processors are many, many generations behind the desktop. A state of the art Maxwell flight rated processor runs at 800 MHz, single core, no vector acceleration, and will cost you $500,000 to $1,000,000.
There is virtually no functional difference between a flight qualified processor and a ground development board. The cost difference is due to the overall reliability requirement for flight parts, for one. If you lose your spacecraft processor you lose your spacecraft, which probably cost you a couple of hundred million dollars. So the yield rate for spacecraft CPUs is quite low, like single percentage low. The chips that fail the qual inspection become ground development units.
In addition the manufacture, storage, and movement of each chip is very carefully managed and documented, which adds a surprising amount to the cost. This allows you to determine root causes in case of a failure, which then lets you understand whether other spacecraft using similar parts are in danger.
Radiation tolerance is an important part of this, both in terms of lifetime exposure tolerance and in terms of single event upset susceptibility.
Suddenly I understand the fuss about the early processors (eg, the Forth ones) that went into spacecraft in the 70s and 80s. It wasn't just the architecture that was good, it was the electrical/physical design that was noteworthy (which, to excuse the terrible pun, the CPUs are still writing home about :D).
Heh, I wonder how much the ground development boards cost? Probably way too much to find one affordably on eBay, say...
Also - how do you figure out if a processor is going to last for ages? How do you test it?!
Hmm, I get the impression some spacecraft probably have full failover capability as well.
And now I wonder what systems use CPUs in lockstep _and_ have full independent failover...
A ground development board would be on the order of $50,000, give or take. You'll also need a chassis and power supply of course.
“Also - how do you figure out if a processor is going to last for ages?”
Really big semiconductor junctions help. Low heat production also helps. And then there's this thing called “heritage”. If it worked on the last fifteen missions, odds are decent it'll work on the sixteenth.
Many spacecraft have fully redundant processors boards. Whether that helps you depends on whether you think chip failures are statistically uncorrelated. Which they are, sometimes. But not if there is a design flaw or manufacturing defect.
This is an absurd observation. Why is that surprising given that the satellite is in space and you have a giant powerplant connected to your PC and powering thousands of things in your city? More specifically, why is it saddening?
Probably because they think the satellite is more capable of doing cool things than their PC, which is just displaying HN and (presumably) nothing more for them.
No. It'll never leave the Solar System unless it happens to surpass the escape velocity of the Solar System. Then, it'll never leave the galaxy unless it surpasses the Milky Way's escape velocity. That would require a tremendous amount of energy. IIRC the Milky Way's orbital escape velocity is something between 300-500km/s (depending on whether you leave the Solar System in a way to take advantage of its forward velocity through the Milky Way or not..)
http://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/topics/20180515_e/