Better Communication Is NASA's Next Frontier

Grok Headline matches for Better Communication Is NASA's Next Frontier

NASA's Genesis crashes

NASA's Genesis crashes 09/08/2004 02:13 PM
Xeni Jardin: The return capsule from NASA's Genesis craft crashed in the Utah desert this morning. From the Wired News story:

The 420-pound space capsule was to have been plucked out of the air by a helicopter and returned safely to earth. It was carrying solar wind samples weighing less than 20 micrograms, which is less than a few grains of salt.

It is unclear whether the samples have been destroyed. NASA officials say that the sapphire, silicon and diamond wafers that were used to collect the samples may have been shattered in the crash, although it may be possible to piece them back together.

"It's a pit in my stomach," said Roger Wiens, flight payload lead at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the creator three of the instruments aboard Genesis. But Wiens was optimistic about the opportunity of recovering samples. "It looks like its in one piece, and we're going to get a lot of samples of solar wind out of there."

Link to WN story, Link< /a> to NASA Genesis home page (Thanks, Chris)

NASA's Finances in Disarray

NASA's Finances in Disarray 05/15/2004 02:37 AM

NASA's New 'Exploration' Insignia

NASA's New 'Exploration' Insignia 05/23/2004 10:34 AM

NASA's Robonaut: Bobafettish

NASA's Robonaut: Bobafettish 05/27/2004 02:03 PM
This is more than just coincidence: NASA has this new robot they are developing that they hope to someday use for EVA missions (Extravehicular Activity i.e. spacewalking) because space walks are dangerous and expensive (and sending manned missions up every...

Has the Shuttle Become NASA's '76 Dart?

Has the Shuttle Become NASA's '76 Dart? 01/26/2004 07:34 PM
NASA and the Bush administration have decided to keep spending several billion dollars a year to put the remaining three shuttles back into space.

NASA's CPOD (DRM Free!)

NASA's CPOD (DRM Free!) 04/13/2004 08:46 AM
JOEL JOHNSON -- Billed as a "black box for human health," the Crew Physiological Observation Device (CPOD) is a wearable unit designed by NASA engineers for keeping tabs on the physical state of pilots or others who operate in extreme conditions. Sensors not only record activity for later analysis, but...

NASA's New Anti-Terrorism Mission

NASA's New Anti-Terrorism Mission 01/22/2004 02:37 AM
Scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center comb through flight-safety records as part of a plan to identify potential terrorists. Critics say the project is beyond the agency's scope. By Noah Shachtman.

":: NASA'S HOME FOR MARS ROVERS ::"

":: NASA'S HOME FOR MARS ROVERS ::" 01/04/2004 03:27 PM

NASA's Personal Satellite Assistants

NASA's Personal Satellite Assistants 06/10/2004 02:39 PM

NASA's Deluge Water Muffler

NASA's Deluge Water Muffler 05/19/2004 12:15 AM
Popular Mechanics May 19 2004 5:15AM GMT

NASA's Genesis Capsule Crashes

NASA's Genesis Capsule Crashes 09/09/2004 05:18 AM
A capsule carrying samples of solar wind was supposed to be plucked out of midair by a helicopter, but its chutes apparently malfunctioned. Amit Asaravala reports from Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah.

NASA's Mars Rover Touches Down

NASA's Mars Rover Touches Down 01/04/2004 01:32 AM
Techfocus Jan 4 2004 0:40AM ET

Hurricanes May Have Upset NASA's
Schedule

Hurricanes May Have Upset NASA's
Schedule 09/18/2004 01:56 AM
Abcnews.go.com - Fri Sep 17, 11:03 am GMT

NASA's Martian Standard Tribe

NASA's Martian Standard Tribe 01/05/2004 01:36 PM
NASA scientists working on the Mars rover have adopted a Martian sleep-schedule so that they can be awake and working during Mars daylight. Not exactly Eastern Standard Tribe, but not far off, either. Link (Thanks, Paul)

Politics and NASA's Management Culture

Politics and NASA's Management Culture 04/11/2005 08:28 PM
Sci-Tech Today Apr 12 2005 12:45AM GMT

Chocks away for NASA's Einstein test

Chocks away for NASA's Einstein test 04/21/2004 06:18 AM
Gravity Probe-B launch successful

NASA's Discovery One Step Closer to
Launch

NASA's Discovery One Step Closer to
Launch 03/31/2005 12:15 AM
Sci-Tech Today Mar 31 2005 4:23AM GMT

NASA's Messenger Probe Departs for
Mercury

NASA's Messenger Probe Departs for
Mercury 08/04/2004 03:14 AM
Once the spacecraft arrives in orbit around the planet in 2011, its battery of seven instruments will study Mercury’s heavily cratered surface.

NASA's bioseeking robot to take a test
drive

NASA's bioseeking robot to take a test
drive 08/05/2004 07:18 PM
ZDNet Aug 5 2004 11:26PM GMT

NASA's latest rover managed to touch
down

NASA's latest rover managed to touch
down 01/04/2004 07:20 AM
US mission touches down on Mars .. Mars rovers are landing tonight .. BASTARDS!!

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3365371.stm
track this site | 6 links

NASA's DART Mission Scrapped in Space

NASA's DART Mission Scrapped in Space 04/16/2005 11:20 PM
Sci-Tech Today Apr 17 2005 2:12AM GMT

NASA's Mars Rover Landing in Toy Stores
(AP)

NASA's Mars Rover Landing in Toy Stores
(AP) 01/18/2004 02:43 PM
AP - The California Institute of Technology is making a little green off the red planet. Caltech, which runs the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA, patented the twin rovers it sent to investigate the surface of Mars and is licensing their images for commercial use.

What is Frontier?

What is Frontier? 06/27/2004 04:46 AM
Bouche la be! 27 Septembre 2001 6:20 - c'est aujourd'hui. Votre vote: ah bon .. Userland fraternity .. What is Frontier? .. FrontierFrontier .. Frontiers .. software .. Frontier

frontier.userland.com
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NASA's Deep Impact Moved Into Cruise
Phase

NASA's Deep Impact Moved Into Cruise
Phase 03/27/2005 05:57 PM

Discovery Crew Says NASA's Attitudes
About Safety Must Change

Discovery Crew Says NASA's Attitudes
About Safety Must Change 04/10/2005 07:27 AM
Sci-Tech Today Apr 10 2005 10:41AM GMT

Congress Cuts NASA's Budget On Apollo
Anniversary

Congress Cuts NASA's Budget On Apollo
Anniversary 07/21/2004 11:21 AM

NASA's Spitzer Marks Beginning of New
Age of Planetary Science

NASA's Spitzer Marks Beginning of New
Age of Planetary Science 03/31/2005 09:11 AM
NASA's Spitzer Marks Beginning of New Age of Planetary Science
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2005-09/relea se.shtml

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has for the first time captured the light from two known planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. The findings mark the beginning of a new age of planetary science, in which "extrasolar" planets can be directly measured and compared. "Spitzer has provided us with a powerful new tool for learning about the temperatures, atmospheres and orbits of planets hundreds of light-years from Earth," said Dr. Drake Deming of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., lead author of a new study on one of the planets. "It's fantastic," said Dr. David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass., lead author of a separate study on a different planet. "We've been hunting for this light for almost 10 years, ever since extrasolar planets were first discovered." The Deming paper appears today in Nature's online publication; the Charbonneau paper will be published in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal. So far, all confirmed extrasolar planets, including the two recently observed by Spitzer, have been discovered indirectly, mainly by the "wobble" technique and more recently, the "transit" technique. In the first method, a planet is detected by the gravitational tug it exerts on its parent star, which makes the star wobble. In the second, a planet's presence is inferred when it passes in front of its star, causing the star to dim, or blink. Both strategies use visible-light telescopes and indirectly reveal the mass and size of planets, respectively. In the new studies, Spitzer has directly observed the warm infrared glows of two previously detected "hot Jupiter" planets, designated HD 209458b and TrES-1. Hot Jupiters are extrasolar gas giants that zip closely around their parent stars. From their toasty orbits, they soak up ample starlight and shine brightly in infrared wavelengths.

Indian students win NASA's space design
contest

Indian students win NASA's space design
contest 07/31/2004 01:56 PM
123Bharath.com Jul 31 2004 5:45PM GMT

Spirit, NASA's Mars rover bounces
down tonight

Spirit, NASA's Mars rover bounces
down tonight 01/03/2004 12:57 PM
Due to land at 11:35PM ET, scientists should know within 10 minutes if it survived entry. Check your cable guide...

NASA's Spirit Rover Examines Unusual
Rock (AP)

NASA's Spirit Rover Examines Unusual
Rock (AP) 02/15/2004 05:01 PM
AP - NASA's Spirit rover stopped to examine an unusual, flaky rock on the surface of Mars Sunday as scientists prepared to send it on a trek that would more than double its one-day distance record.

NASA's Mars Spirit makes its big
roll-off (USATODAY.com)

NASA's Mars Spirit makes its big
roll-off (USATODAY.com) 01/17/2004 10:42 PM
USATODAY.com - A journey of 303 million miles will take its next step this weekend as NASA's Spirit rover starts exploring Mars.

NASA's Shuttle Hangar Badly Damaged by
Storm

NASA's Shuttle Hangar Badly Damaged by
Storm 09/08/2004 03:09 AM
The gigantic hangar where the space shuttle is prepared for its missions sustained much more damage from Hurricane Frances than initially believed.

NASA's Centennial Challenge Aims To
Boost Innovation

NASA's Centennial Challenge Aims To
Boost Innovation 03/27/2005 08:43 PM
Sci-Tech Today Mar 27 2005 11:27PM GMT

NASA's Earth Observatory Shows Solar
Flare

NASA's Earth Observatory Shows Solar
Flare 10/29/2003 12:11 AM

IT's Final Frontier

IT's Final Frontier 03/06/2004 02:02 AM
FEATURE: Private IT firms -- especially networking, security and chipmakers -- must play a critical role in NASA's moon and Mars missions, experts say. What's more, NASA has to let them.

CSS3 - The new Frontier

CSS3 - The new Frontier 05/14/2004 07:53 AM
Web Development stands on the edge of mostly unexplored territory — the mysterious realm of CSS3. How will CSS3 radically change the way we create websites? More importantly, what bits of CSS3 are already supported? This article will answer these questions.

Open Frontier

Open Frontier 05/17/2004 08:44 AM
Dave Winer: At some point in the next few months, there will be an open source release of the Frontier kernel. Does anybody remember Domino Go WebServer?  Anybody?  Bueller? The thought process that Dave describes exactly mirrors the thought process that IBM went through a few years back when it decided to participate in Apache.

The next search frontier

The next search frontier 06/14/2004 04:35 PM
Source: cnnmoney - Investors' focus right now is mainly on the Web search market and the battles breaking out between Ask Jeeves, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. But later this year, you'll see interest shift to the emerging market for...

Frontier Dreams

Frontier Dreams 05/21/2004 12:50 PM
In the back of my mind I’ve been thinking about the open-s ourcing of the Frontier kernel, and like some other folks it’s made me dream of software that’s close in spirit to the early versions of Frontier, before it became the basis for a content management system.

For those who don’t know, Frontier began life as a scripting system for Macintosh. But not just another language—it included an object database and a relatively rich (for the time) library of verbs. You wrote code in an outliner, which I still think is a wonderful way to write code.

You used it do many of the same things people use Perl and Python (and so on) for today, only it was on Macintosh System 7. Instead of using pipes and Unix-y things for inter-application communication, it used Apple events. (Like AppleScript.) It was very common to use Frontier to do tasks that required scripting one or more other applications.

For instance, your script might grab data from a Filemaker database, format it as text in Frontier, then create a new email message in Eudora and send it. With Frontier’s scheduler, its cron-equivalent, you could make this happen once an hour or whatever. And you might archive the data in its object database and create weekly reports based on that data.

That’s just a for-instance, of course. The gist of it was that it made it possible to do custom things that apps like Filemaker and Eudora would never (quite rightly) have supported on their own.

Sounds like AppleScript, right? Well, yes. But Frontier brought some things that AppleScript doesn’t have. (The browse-able object database, the richer library of verbs, the code outliner, the scheduler, and so on. Frontier is an entire environment on its own, though an open one, aware of the rest of the system.)

My dream app

First thing—I don’t have plans to work on Frontier. I’d love to use the results of someone else’s work, though! As much fun as it would be for me to work on it (partly because the kernel is an old friend, but more so because I know a lot of Frontier users who are cool cats) it just isn’t on my path. However, I’d be happy to make sure my software works well with people who want to script it with Frontier.

Anyway... my dream app goes back to that earlier vision of Frontier. To bring it up-to-date, there are a few things I’d love to see:

Python

Whitespace-aware Python just begs to be written in an outliner. The language is similar in style to UserTalk (Frontier’s scripting language), but, key fact, it’s object-oriented.

The object-oriented thing is a big deal: I’ve gotten so I won’t even consider writing in a procedural language for anything but the smallest of tasks. I want objects.

And Python is just plain cool.

I wouldn’t advocate dropping UserTalk, I’d argue for making Python a first-class peer of UserTalk. There are some challenges to consider, though. Frontier internally is receptive to other languages. (Note that you can write scripts in any OSA language, including AppleScript). But you’d have to make it so Python could access the object database (to store and retrieve data and to call other scripts) and you’d want a way to freeze-dry Python objects in the database.

Cocoa front-end

Okay, obviously I don’t care about classic Mac OS or Windows. I care about OS X.

When Frontier was written, there were no system-supplied user interface controls for tables, outlines, and toolbars. And all applications polled for events (via WaitNextEvent, if I remember correctly).

The first obvious thing to do is replace a bunch of the user interface code with .nib files and standard Cocoa widgets. However, I think I’d retain the existing outliner for writing scripts. (Cocoa and Carbon can co-exist: it’s not a problem.) But all toolbars, the object-database browser, text-editing views, and so on would use Cocoa user interface.

In theory, you’d end up with less code, better performance, and a modern OS X UI.

Bonus points: custom windows

Sometimes you want to create a mini-application, a custom dialog or window backed by a script. Frontier has a long history (at least on classic Mac OS) of supporting this: you could run dialogs from resources, you could run MacBird cards.

In the year 2004, the thing to do would be to run dialogs and windows from .nib files. You’d lay out your user interface using Interface Builder, then run it in Frontier.

How would you handle wiring up actions and outlets to scripts in Interface Builder? Glad you asked. You probably wouldn’t. One way to handle this is to give each item a unique tag in IB. Then your script might have a handler like on itemDidSendAction (itemRef, actionRef). This would be called when a checkbox was clicked, a button pressed, whatever. Your script would, obviously, have to branch on which item sent the action and what the action was. Not quite as slick as wiring up actions, but it would work.

The other side of the coin is outlets. That’s where tags come in. To get a reference to an item, you might write something like itemRef = cocoaWindow.itemWithTag (tag, windowRef). Then you could do things like set the value of a text field like so: cocoaWindow.setStringValueForItem (itemRef, someString).

Double bonus points

Get PyObjC in the mix of all this, and now you’re talking about something extraordinary.

Anyway...

It’s possible that there will be an exciting burst of creativity once the kernel is made open-source. I think that’s totally cool, it it comes to be. For my part, I’d be happy to answer any questions I can for people who work on the code, since I know a little about it.

It’s entirely possible that the things I’d like to see are not the things most people would like to see, and that’s fine. (But I can dream, right?)

P.S. A glimpse into the kernel: The first thing you’ll discover is that, before Frontier was Frontier, its name was Cancoon.
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Better Communication Is NASA's Next Frontier

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