What the Project Does
In Andy Weir's novel Project Hail Mary, the protagonist locates himself in interstellar space by the relative positions of stars. This project grounds that premise in real data: ESA's Gaia mission mapped the precise positions and motions of over a billion stars in the Milky Way, and the author used it to generate "the starry sky as seen from any star," answering a rather romantic engineering question—if you really were lost in nearby interstellar space, how would you find your way back to the solar system by the star map?
Why It Took Off on HN
It has nothing to do with AI; it took off on the strength of that long-missed pure hands-on joy: open data, a question so concrete it's almost naive, and it carried through in earnest. Coinciding with the film's release and this book's resurgent popularity is a timing bonus too. As an aside, Gaia's dataset is fully public and well-documented—great material for practicing data processing and visualization. Amid a screen full of model releases and funding rounds, an occasional entry like this is a breath of air in the news stream.
via: Hacker News