The big news today is, of course, the successful launch and deployment of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope earlier this morning. The space agency’s latest observatory lifted off at 7:26 AM Eastern from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, and by 8:00 AM it was separated from the rocket’s upper stage and flying on its own.
While the sound and fury of launch is exciting, it’s just the beginning of the journey for Roman. It will take several months for the spacecraft to complete its roughly 1.5 million-kilometer trek out to Earth’s second Lagrange point (L2), where it will set up shop near — in cosmic terms, anyway — the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Along the way, it will switch on and test various systems and components, with its primary 300 megapixel infrared camera scheduled to power up in three weeks or so.
There’s a lot to cover about the Roman Space Telescope. Built from spy satellite spare parts donated by the National Reconnaissance Office and featuring a field of view 100 times greater than that of Hubble, its launch is widely considered to be one of the most important scientific milestones of the decade. We’ll be bringing you more about the past, present, and future of this flagship mission as it progresses.
From real space missions to virtual ones, this week the developers of EVE Online announced that 2.4 million lines of code that keep the massively multiplayer online role-playing game running would finally be making the switch to Python 3. Given the immense complexity of the codebase, it’s been stuck at Python 2.7 since their last overhaul back in 2010, a situation which has become increasingly difficult to manage as time goes on.
The announcement goes into a surprising amount of depth about the state of Python in EVE. We imagine most players couldn’t care less, but naturally the developers have strong feelings about the situation and perhaps thought it would benefit others in a similar situation to get their thoughts out there.
While there’s certainly an argument to be made that the only justification they really need for making the migration is that 2.7 hit end-of-life back in 2020, the developers explain that the more immediate problem for them was that various tools and libraries they wanted to use were no longer compatible with the Python 2.x series. They also point out hopes that speed improvements made in the latest version of Python will eventually translate into better game performance down the road.
In more terrestrial news, this week the necessary regulatory amendments were passed to make plug-in solar systems legal in the United Kingdom. Assuming the wiring meets the necessary requirements, consumers can pick up the hardware and install it themselves without involving an electrician, although they may still need to contend with landlords and local ordinances that may limit their ability to physically mount the panels. The rules as they stand now allow each residence to have four panels with a total combined output rating of no more than 2,000 watts, although critically, the system is only allowed to generate a maximum of 800 watts at the inverter. As the government and consumers get more comfortable with plug-in solar systems, these numbers will likely increase over time.
Solar isn’t the only area where DIY approaches are moving into the mainstream. This week, Citrix pitched a “different approach to endpoint resiliency”: an isolated Linux-based operating system called UniconOS that users can boot into should the computer’s primary Windows installation become compromised or otherwise inoperable. The idea is that an independent, read-only backup OS kept on its own partition will reduce downtime, since the computer can still be used while IT figures out what the hell happened.
This solution will sound suspiciously familiar to anyone who’s booted a live Linux system from CD/DVD/USB in the last few decades. Try not to keep yourself up all night wondering why you never pitched the idea to some hungry venture capitalists in exchange for a yacht in the Bahamas.
Finally, on the theme of new technology embracing the old ways, we bring you Defrag98, a web reincarnation of Microsoft’s dial-up era Disk Defragmenter tool. While it won’t actually improve the performance of your modern solid-state drive, you may find your own mood boosted by the wave of nostalgia when you see — and hear — the classic tool go to work.
That’s right, not only do the blocks dutifully flip from red to blue just like you remember, but all the while you’ll be treated to the unmistakable whirs and clicks of a spinning hard drive circa the turn of the millennium. Never forget what they took from us.
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