[HN Gopher] Day 2 Operations with the James Webb Space Telescope...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Day 2 Operations with the James Webb Space Telescope is about to
       begin
        
       Author : flyingbarron
       Score  : 103 points
       Date   : 2022-07-11 13:05 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (flyingbarron.medium.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (flyingbarron.medium.com)
        
       | nharada wrote:
       | I have no technical insight, but I'm SO stoked to see these
       | images tomorrow.
        
       | bearjaws wrote:
        
         | krallja wrote:
         | Nixon called Neil and Buzz on the moon. Reagan sent a message
         | of good wishes to STS-1 (he was recovering from an
         | assassination attempt). Biden gets to present the government's
         | telescope pix. It's one of the honors of being the President.
        
           | ssnistfajen wrote:
           | Carter wrote a message included in the Voyager Golden Record.
           | These are formalities which I don't understand why that
           | person was upset at this.
        
         | ddalex wrote:
         | Depends on what we see in the images. If we see space
         | structures that are undeniable artificial, spanning tens of
         | billions of light years in size, yes, that would be something
         | that the president would announce.
        
           | dotnet00 wrote:
           | If the telescope saw any undeniably artificial structure
           | billions of light years in size, there would be a lot more to
           | worry about than who announces it. It would effectively be
           | like discovering god given how absurd a size billions of
           | light years is.
        
         | geoffeg wrote:
         | I'm of two minds here. I agree with you but hopefully having
         | Biden involved in the briefing will draw more attention to what
         | I think it one of the coolest large science and engineering
         | projects in decades (just my opinion).
        
         | flyingbarron wrote:
         | I think it emphasizes the importance of the results - it's for
         | everyone, not just scientific types.
         | 
         | Back in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson "expressed interest" in
         | the first close-up pictures NASA got from the Moon on Ranger 7.
         | The freshly developed images were loaded onto a plane and the
         | President got a private briefing with the head of NASA on the
         | very same day. (sorry, I don't think I can link the picture)
         | https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4210/pages/Ch_18.htm
        
           | dylan604 wrote:
           | >President got a private briefing with the head of NASA
           | 
           | head of NASA aka the Vice President. maybe you meant the NASA
           | administrator?
        
             | onionisafruit wrote:
             | I think they mean James Webb.
             | 
             | As a side note, I thought the NASA Administrator reported
             | to POTUS.
        
               | dylan604 wrote:
               | Very possibly. It's in my head that the NASA
               | Administrator "reported" to VPOTUS, but that could just
               | be from a bit in a movie more so than real world.
        
         | Victerius wrote:
         | A phenomenon I've noticed is that the most important person in
         | an organization tends to always make the coolest announcements.
         | This applies equally to the government and to corporations.
         | 
         | Dear presidents, governors, and CEOs, please let lower level
         | employees make the cool announcements.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | phailhaus wrote:
         | Way more people will pay attention to the President announcing
         | it than "so-and-so from NASA". Though I too hope he passes it
         | over to the team to explain the findings.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | itslennysfault wrote:
         | It's quite the opposite. It's an honor that this is big enough
         | news that the president is going to be the one presenting this
         | to the world.
        
         | furyofantares wrote:
         | Kinda? But honestly I bet the people who worked on it are
         | excited by the prestige of having the president release them.
         | It'll get way more eyeballs on the event I'm sure, and he's
         | almost certainly going to praise the people who worked on it
        
         | 1970-01-01 wrote:
         | No. Biden does not take credit for the images and will present
         | them as decades of international effort. The former President
         | would claim he took the images all by himself.
        
           | throwaway12245 wrote:
           | Biden's probably not going to be taking credit for any images
           | this week.
        
           | prpl wrote:
           | He has presided over one of those decades
        
         | thehappypm wrote:
         | If my ego were so large that I'd rather present my own work
         | than let the POTUS do it for me, I'd probably be running Tesla.
        
         | guerrilla wrote:
        
       | rob74 wrote:
       | If this "day 2" does not refer to an actual day (which does not
       | have a real meaning if you're not on a planet), but to a phase,
       | why do they call it "day" and not "phase"? Does "phase" have some
       | kind of negative connotation, does it sound too "scientific"?
        
         | luxuryballs wrote:
         | hmm maybe day 2 is after day 1 and before day 3 but not
         | necessarily adjacent, meaning a specific day kicks something
         | off any number of days after a previous planned day? So over
         | the course of the next month we have 3 special days that kick
         | off different phases.
        
         | zamadatix wrote:
         | I think the terms day 0/1/2 have caught on because they are
         | constant across projects regardless how lacking or overboard
         | the phase planning was. I.e. the project may or may not have
         | much more detailed actual phases and those phases may or may
         | not be obvious to someone without a background in the project
         | but anyone can understand where the project is at without first
         | ingesting the entire project plan.
        
           | 9dev wrote:
           | Funny you would mention days being a constant for a space
           | telescope on an orbit around the sun, where days definitely
           | do not mean the same thing as they do on earth :)
        
         | dredmorbius wrote:
         | See for example "day 1" (Bezos / Amazon):
         | 
         | https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/04/21/what-is-jeff-b...
         | 
         | (Not an edorsement / fandom.)
        
         | flyingbarron wrote:
         | I honestly don't know.
         | 
         | Just to clarify, the term "Day-2" isn't from NASA, it's a
         | universal engineering term - which mostly happens on Earth ;)
         | 
         | I'm guessing it's just a planning term - like D-Day :shrugs:
        
           | throw0101a wrote:
           | * https://dzone.com/articles/defining-day-2-operations
           | 
           | * https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/day-2-ops/
        
             | formerly_proven wrote:
             | I'll admit I've never heard of day 0/1/2 before.
        
               | [deleted]
        
             | flyingbarron wrote:
             | Still doesn't explain why "Day" and not "Phase" or "Stage"
             | or "Level" or "Period"
             | 
             | I think I covered the basic explanation in my article as
             | well as dzone and gitlab did in theirs.
             | 
             | :D
        
               | zardo wrote:
               | I think "day one" was an existing phrase that was
               | confusingly extended to cover other "start of phase"
               | concepts.
               | 
               | Sounds like a nice way to trick your management though,
               | "Uh no, it won't have feature X on day one, but that will
               | be working by Day-2."
        
           | JacobThreeThree wrote:
           | I see Day-0, Day-1, Day-2 etc. used in the context of
           | business planning quite frequently.
        
             | GrumpyNl wrote:
             | So its in 3 days?
        
               | outworlder wrote:
               | No.
               | 
               | Day zero is usually prep work. Etc.
               | 
               | "Day 2" could be a decade or for as long as the system is
               | maintained.
        
       | interestica wrote:
       | Okay, anyone think it's strange that they pushed back the release
       | at the last minute (to 1730EDT) -- and they have done a pretty
       | poor job of making that obvious on their channels (eg twitter or
       | live NASAtv feed). Strange strange.
        
         | tigershark wrote:
         | 45 minutes as of now, it's getting ridiculous..
        
           | WaffleIronMaker wrote:
           | Yeah, get a move on!
        
         | EcLRZjyicBSbwRV wrote:
         | Not particularly, would assume something came up and the
         | briefing needed to be pushed 30 min. Don't think it's
         | particularly strange for the President's schedule to be moved
         | around.
         | 
         | As for the tweets, there is a tweet from yesterday:
         | https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1546290906046816256
         | 
         | What exactly were you looking for?
        
       | moffkalast wrote:
       | Time to see how much damage that micrometeoroid did.
        
         | flyingbarron wrote:
         | I'm pretty sure that if there was any bad news they'd be
         | managing expectations.
         | 
         | This is the quiet of confidence, I think :)
        
           | moffkalast wrote:
           | Here's to hoping :D
        
         | windsurfer wrote:
         | A man fired multiple bullets into a telescope and put many
         | holes in the primary mirror, but the science capabilities were
         | only minimally affected:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_J._Smith_Telescope
         | 
         | This telescope design already has a giant hole in the middle,
         | and the light-collecting capabilities are hardly affected by
         | small holes.
        
           | ianai wrote:
           | I think it's kind of like how FaceID or TouchID work
           | regardless of orientation of face/fingerprint. Or how
           | locating a radio source from data across multiple detectors
           | would utilize math and any damage would drop out as slightly
           | more noise. Modern cameras often have dead pixels in their
           | detectors but they're just skipped in the output photos.
        
         | jcims wrote:
         | As long as it didn't hit any of the actuator mechanism my guess
         | is it probably will just add a bit of noise/bias that they can
         | largely eliminate.
         | 
         | https://practicalastrophotography.com/a-brief-guide-to-calib...
        
         | q1w2 wrote:
         | Statistically speaking, it's quite concerning that such a large
         | hit has occurred so soon after launch and thus does not bode
         | well for the predicted lifespan of the telescope.
         | 
         | We pray it was an extreme outlier.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | aortega wrote:
         | I have several telescopes and I have dropped things in the
         | mirrors quite often. The decrease in quality from a damaged
         | mirror is almost zero. You only lose a tiny part of the total
         | surface. Is not like hubble that had the wrong shape. A tiny
         | speck in the mirror is likely undetectable. Even a bigger one
         | wont affect that much.
        
         | dghughes wrote:
         | It's like when you get a new phone and scratch the screen just
         | taking the screen cover off.
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-11 23:01 UTC)