Hackaday Link: 24 July 2022

Okay, maybe it won’t work right away. NASA has released a more detailed analysis of the damage suffered by the James Webb Space Telescope in a clash with a micrometeoroid, and considers the damage “irreparable”. Not that any damage to the JWST could be repaired, at least in the sense that the Hubble Space Telescope could be equipped with optics to repair its precisely grounded but inaccurately grounded main mirror. JWST is too far for a service call, so the correction in this case refers to a combination of what can be achieved by changing the shape and position of the affected mirror segment, and what can be handled with image processing. Damage to segment C3, as well as damage to other segments in a total of six collisions in Webb’s half year at the station, was assessed via “wavefront sensing”, which looks at how out-of-phase the light coming from each mirror segment is. The damage sounds terrible, and it certainly hurts the technicians and engineers who lovingly and painstakingly built the thing to see it damaged, but in the long run, this damage shouldn’t hinder Webb’s long-term science goals.

In other space news, we heard that Perseverance The rover has taken its first slice of the ancient river delta at Jezero Crater. Rover had been poking around for something interesting to emulate, but everything he tried with his scourer was too fragile, too difficult to achieve, or scientifically boring. Eventually the explorer found a good place to drill, and managed to bring up a 6.7 cm core sample. This makes the tenth core sample collected in its entirety, and the first from the delta region, which is thought to have the best chance of containing evidence of ancient Martian life.

Closer to home, we’ve all probably heard of robotic surgery, but the picture that emerges doesn’t really match reality. Robotic-assisted surgery might be a better term, as surgical robots are generally just very precise remote manipulators guided by a skilled surgeon. But if studies of the performance of surgical robots are any indication, the days of human surgeons may be numbered. The study compared the accuracy and speed of both human surgeons controlling a standard Da Vinci surgical robot and an autonomous version of the robot itself, using a depth camera for sensing. Using standard surgical skill tests, the autonomic system matches human surgeons in terms of failure – fortunately, there’s no “oopsies” for either – but beats humans in speed and positional accuracy. It may be a while before fully autonomous surgeons become a reality, but we wouldn’t bet against it in the long term.

Most readers must have heard the exciting news that Supercon is returning this year as a face-to-face event! Make sure you set aside the first weekend in November for a pilgrimage to Pasadena — it will be great to see everyone again after a long absence. But if you can’t wait until November for an IRL cheater, consider stopping by SCALE 19X, coming this week in Los Angeles. The Southern California Linux Expo was held from July 28 to 31, and featured many speakers, including a keynote by Vint Cerf. Hackaday readers can save 50% on tickets with promo code HACK.

And finally, as lovers of Easter eggs of all kinds, but particularly the hidden messages in various software, we appreciate this ode to Easter eggs, the embedded artistry that has served as a creative outlet for programmers for years. The article lists some great examples of art forms, along with explaining why they are such an important artifact of the tech world and what they are used for. We tried a few listed in the article that we had never heard of before; some hits, some misses, but they’re all appreciated. Well, most of them—the kind of corporate hoopla can be outright annoying as far as we’re concerned.

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