Hackaday links: July 24, 2022

Well, that probably won’t be improved right away. NASA released More detailed analysis of damage to the James Webb Space Telescope Encountered with a delicate meteor, the damage was deemed “irreparable”. Not that any damage to the JWST could be repaired, at least in the sense that the Hubble Space Telescope was able to provide it with the optics to fix its main mirror that wasn’t accurate to Earth. JWST is very far from the service call, so correctability in this case refers to a combination of what can be achieved by modifying the shape and position of the affected mirror segment and what can be taken care of when processing images. Damage to segment C3, as well as damage to other segments in a total of six collisions in half a year Webb was at the station, is assessed by “wavefront sensing,” which looks at how the light exits from each stage. mirror piece. The damage looks bad, and surely it should hurt the techies and engineers who built the thing so lovingly and painstakingly to see it actually explode, but in the long run, that damage shouldn’t get in the way of Webb’s long-term scientific goals.

In other space news, we hear it The perseverance The probe took the first piece of the ancient river delta at Jezero Crater. The rover was looking for something interesting to sample, but everything I tried with the scraper was either too fragile, hard to come by, or scientifically boring. In the end, the rover found a good place to dig, and was able to bring in a 6.7 cm core sample. This makes the tenth core sample collected overall, and the first from the delta region, which is thought to have the best chance of containing evidence of ancient Martian life.

Close to home, we’ve probably all heard of robotic surgery, but the image it conjures doesn’t really match up with reality. Robot-assisted surgery is perhaps the better term, because surgical robots are generally just ultra-precise remote maneuvers directed by a skilled surgeon. but if A study on the performance of a surgical robot Is any indication, the days of human surgeons may be numbered. The study compared the accuracy and speed of both a human surgeon controlling a standard Da Vinci surgical robot and a standalone version of the robot alone, using a depth-sensing camera. Using a standard test of surgical skills, the stand-alone system matched human surgeons in terms of failure — fortunately, no “surgeries” for either — but outperformed humans in speed and positional accuracy. It will likely be some time before independent surgeons become a thing, but we wouldn’t bet against it in the long run.

No doubt, most of our readers have heard the exciting news that Supercon will be back this year As a personal event! Make sure to set aside the first weekend of November to make a pilgrimage to Pasadena – it would be great to see everyone again after a long absence. But if you can’t wait until November to cheat IRL, consider passing by 19X scaleComing this week in Los Angeles. The Southern California Linux Expo takes place July 28-31 and features a large number of speakers, including a keynote by Vint Cerf. Hackaday readers can save 50% on tickets with the promo code HACK.

And finally, as a lover of Easter eggs of all kinds, but precisely for the message hidden in the diversity of programs, we appreciated This is an Easter egg poem, the embedded art that has served as a creative outlet for programmers over the years. The article lists some great examples of the art form, along with an explanation of why they are such important artifacts in the world of technology and what they are good for. We tried quite a few items listed in the article that we hadn’t heard of before; Some hits, some mistakes, but they are all appreciated. Well, most of them are – the corporate rah-rah type that can eavesdrop directly as far as we’re concerned.