Author: Mitchell Clark
I look to the stars, and I see semicolons. | Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
It turns out that JavaScript, the programming language that web developers and users alike love to complain about, had a hand in delivering the stunning images that the James Webb Space Telescope has been beaming back to Earth. And no, I don’t mean that in some snarky way, like that the website NASA hosts them on uses JavaScript (it does). I mean that the actual telescope, arguably one of humanity’s finest scientific achievements, is largely controlled by JavaScript files. Oh, and it’s based on a software development kit from 2002.
According to a manuscript (PDF) for the JWST’s Integrated Science Instrument Module (or ISIM), the software for the ISIM is controlled by “the Script Processor Task (SP), which runs scripts written in...
Continue reading…
Continue reading...
I look to the stars, and I see semicolons. | Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
It turns out that JavaScript, the programming language that web developers and users alike love to complain about, had a hand in delivering the stunning images that the James Webb Space Telescope has been beaming back to Earth. And no, I don’t mean that in some snarky way, like that the website NASA hosts them on uses JavaScript (it does). I mean that the actual telescope, arguably one of humanity’s finest scientific achievements, is largely controlled by JavaScript files. Oh, and it’s based on a software development kit from 2002.
According to a manuscript (PDF) for the JWST’s Integrated Science Instrument Module (or ISIM), the software for the ISIM is controlled by “the Script Processor Task (SP), which runs scripts written in...
Continue reading…
Continue reading...