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DannyB [soylentnews.org] writes:

The James Webb Space Telescope runs JavaScript, apparently [theverge.com]
It’s in charge of taking the pretty pictures

It turns out that JavaScript, the programming language that web developers and users alike love to complain about, [idlewords.com] had a hand in delivering the stunning images [theverge.com] 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 [nasa.gov] 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.

[....] This knowledge has been bubbling up on the internet in Hacker News [ycombinator.com] and Twitter [twitter.com] threads for years, but it still surprised quite a few of us here at The Verge once it actually clicked. At first blush, it just seems odd that such a vital (not to mention expensive [theverge.com]) piece of scientific equipment would be controlled by a very old version of a technology that’s not particularly known for being robust.

After thinking about it for a second, though, the software’s age makes a bit more sense — while the JWST was launched in late 2021, the project has been in the works since 1989.

[....] NASA’s document says that this way of doing things gives “operations personnel greater visibility, control and flexibility over the telescope operations,” letting them easily change the scripts “as they learn the ramifications and subtleties of operating the instruments.” Basically, NASA’s working with a bunch of files that are written in a somewhat human-readable format — if they need to make changes, they can just open up a text editor, do a bunch of testing on the ground, then send the updated file to the JWST

I would remind everyone that SpaceX Dragon 2 crewed capsule's touch screen control panels are run by the Chrome browser and Javascript. [infoq.com]

Original Submission