“I started realizing that religion shows up in the natural sciences and the contemporary world in a funny and alarming way,” Rubenstein said. “Because sciences tend to think of themselves as something as far away as possible from religion, as having freed themselves from God. To an extent that’s true. But in the process, they tend to generate these big stories, big mythologies, about the origins and the ends of the world. And conjure characters who are heroes, gods, and monsters. I started tracking the way that the natural sciences themselves generate new ways of understanding the world that, a couple centuries ago, we would have called religion.”

More here.

The Sun as seen by Solar Orbiter in extreme ultraviolet light from a distance of roughly 75 million kilometres. The image is a mosaic of 25 individual images taken on 7 March by the high resolution telescope of the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument. Taken at a wavelength of 17 nanometers, in the extreme ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum, this image reveals the Sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona, which has a temperature of around a million degrees Celsius. In total, the final image contains more than 83 million pixels in a 9148 x 9112 pixel grid, making it the highest resolution image of the Sun’s full disc and outer atmosphere, the corona, ever taken.

High resolution image and more details on ESA website.

After a quarter-century of effort by tens of thousands of people, more than $10 billion in taxpayer funding, and some 350 deployment mechanisms that had to go just so, the James Webb Space Telescope fully unfurled its wings. The massive spacecraft completed its final deployments, and, by God, the process went smoothly.

Ars Technica’s Eric Berger has long been my go-to pusher for space-related stuff. His report on Saturday’s milestone is accurate and to the point as usual. Today he has another article on ESA Arianne 5’s fundamental contribution to the mission. I love how modern, successful space missions are almost always the result of no-bullshit joint efforts by multiple international actors.

Update: The James Webb Telescope has reached its final destination.

I think it is relatively straightforward to think of cool things to do with SpaceX Starships, so recent posts have focused on trying to understand the more mixed consequences for incumbent industrial organizations that are not ideally positioned to exploit the coming advances. It is, however, a fun exercise to enumerate all the ways in which Starship and related technologies can help execute bold, ambitious missions of scientific discovery.

It’s long-form, yes, but well worth it. Oh, and while you’re at it, you might as well read Starship is Still Not Understood, Casey’s previous article on the topic.

Only 24 people have journeyed far enough to see the whole Earth against the black of space. The images they brought back changed our world. Here is a selection of the most beautiful photographs of Earth — iconic images and unknown gems — digitally restored to their full glory.

Toby Ord’s recent Earth Restored project is a must-see.

As I was following the live broadcast, I wondered: What kind of hardware and software runs all this incredible technology? It was launched in 2020, so it must be some cutting-edge stuff. As it turns out, that isn’t really the case.

Perseverance computer uses the BAE RAD750 radiation-hardened single board computer². Released twenty years ago (2001), the RAD750 is based on the PowerPC 750, designed by IBM and Motorola and released in 1997³. The exact same computer is mounted on Curiosity⁴, which launched ten years ago.

It basically has the power of a circa 1992 Pentium 1 chip and will be responsible for handling the entire avionics architecture of the rover designed and programmed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) ([source][6])

From the same source, we learn that at least good-ole RAD750 is not left alone:

The ‘old school’ RDA750 computer will work in tandem with a series of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) computers to control such things as the drivetrain, wheels, suspension and cameras.

I could not find any reliable information on the programming languages involved. I am guessing a mix of C/C++ and maybe Ada, as is typical of the aerospace industry. The operating system itself is VxWorks⁵, a real-time operating system initially released in 1987. This is a fascinating piece of software.

Two considerations come to mind. First, and I am repeating myself here, what a phenomenal achievement this landing is. As we watched the broadcast, I told my wife: these guys are literally making the future of humanity. What did I know that they’re making it on twenty-year-old technology. Second. We, ordinary people, might all be using way more power (and grid) than is really needed.

Updated on February 23th, 2021:

On Monday, NASA released [a video][7] of Perseverance’s descent to the red planet. If it looks like aliens are descending on the surface, it’s because, well, that is what happens. We are the aliens. NASA also released an absolutely mind-blowing [recording][8] of sounds from Mars’s surface.