
Hayabusa2 Now - MKais
http://haya2now.jp/en.html
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gtirloni
_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._

[http://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/topics/20180515_e/](http://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/topics/20180515_e/)

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swazzy
In case anyone wants to create a realtime 3d simulator:
[http://haya2now.jp/data/data.json](http://haya2now.jp/data/data.json)

~~~
happyent
Pass javascript unixtime as url Parameter and you get data over time as well

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andreygrehov
What am I looking at?

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ehsankia
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]

[0] [https://www.space.com/41912-japanese-hopping-rovers-land-
on-...](https://www.space.com/41912-japanese-hopping-rovers-land-on-
asteroid.html)

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unsignedint
Some of those earth based stations shown are Deep Space Network stations. You
can see status of Deep Space Network at DSN now[0], too.

[0]: [https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/](https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/)

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doitLP
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.

Otherwise super cool!

Anyone know how long the signal delay is?

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GlenTheMachine
Time-of-flight to Ryugu right now is just under 16 minutes.

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sizzzzlerz
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.

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bronson
> ... so I find that display quite confusing. I hope the spacecraft
> controller's display isn't like that.

Why? You're assuming you have a similar amount of training/experience as the
controller?

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spockz
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.

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yebyen
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."

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tluyben2
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.

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GlenTheMachine
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).

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sneak
I am definitely reusing this css for something cool in the future.

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sidcool
This is amazing. What's the risk that the probe would be thrown out into space
when jumping over a bump due to extremely feeble gravity of Ryugu.

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greglindahl
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.

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emcrazyone
funny that they have power down to the milli-watt and it's so stable. Anyone
know what the update rate is? Is it with every second?

Cool looking web site

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dvh
When I posted it 15 days ago nobody cared:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17936567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17936567)

~~~
dang
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html))
and why we do things like the second-chance pool
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](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!

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jaysonelliot
Monochromatic interfaces can be so beautiful.

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.

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neoteo
macOS: Preferences-> Accessibility -> Display -> Use grayscale

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sizzzzlerz
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.

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alphakappa
The typeface is pretty neat. For the curious, it's Nova Mono

[https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Nova+Mono](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Nova+Mono)

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comex
It looks cool, but those curly lowercase i's and l's really confuse my brain.
I find myself parsing them both as uppercase L's...

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Keloo
Am I the only one who thought about motorcycle?

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exikyut
I feel like I'm massively missing out here. What reference is this to?

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grzm
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_Hayabusa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_Hayabusa)

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sscarduzio
Am I the only one that clicked expecting to see a motorbike?

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Kankuro
I expected a train

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posterboy
I expected an elite FTP server

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fermienrico
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.

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jacobush
Kind of agree - however, if the interface elements never move around and stay
the same, it's very similar a UX to the instrument panels of old.

I.e. not that bad, if precaution is taken against information overload in some
kind if crisis.

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fermienrico
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.

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zepolen
You're completely correct, but the only way people will understand how bad the
UI is if they were forced to use it in their daily.

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jacobush
Exactly the opposite might be true - if you used it daily you would be
accustomed to where the critical data is and what it looks like.

(Ignoring things which are unknown to us - for instance would the operator
benefit from trends in data? This does not seem to be present in the UX.)

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loopycode
I thought it was a new gen bike

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dev_dull
> _Bus power consumption: 600w_

Sad to think my hacker news machine (PC) is using more power than an an
intergalactic satellite.

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GlenTheMachine
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.

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exikyut
Are there any functional or operational differences besides "it's going in a
satellite so we get to charge you this much"?

Radiation testing, maybe?

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GlenTheMachine
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.

~~~
exikyut
Wow, thanks for the TIL.

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...

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GlenTheMachine
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.

