The Download: NASA’s new space telescope and OpenAI’s autonomous hacker

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This is today’s edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

When NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, as early as the end of next month, it will attempt one of astronomy’s most precise disappearing acts to date. It will carry the first space-bound “active” coronagraph, an instrument that effectively erases most of the light from a star during photography.

The technology will allow astronomers to take the first pictures of planets orbiting other stars that are similar to those in our solar system. Ultimately, it could pave the way for a future mission that could snap the first photos of Earth-like worlds.

“I hope it’s remembered for it being that critical stepping stone for … finding Earth 2.0,” says Brandon Creager, the instrument’s lead mechanical engineer.

Read the full story on the space telescope that could transform the search for distant planets .

The machine that could change the world will be housed in a room that looks like a data center crossed with an ice cream factory.

Inside, some 100 stainless-steel cabinets each hold hundreds of chips. On those chips, thousands of light particles will fly through a maze of optical switches and beam splitters. Each photon must be accounted for, because precisely measuring where it ends up will help answer questions that current computers might take millions of years to solve.

This computer, as described, does not exist. It’s the brainchild of a company called PsiQuantum, founded in 2016 by four physicists from UK universities. In a crowded field of deep-pocketed competitors with similarly fantastical visions, the company aims to be the first to build a useful quantum machine .

This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts . Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 OpenAI says one of its models carried out an autonomous hack It escaped its testing sandbox and breached AI research platform Hugging Face. ( Reuters $) + OpenAI described it as a cybersecurity test that went badly wrong. ( WSJ $) + The hack is among the first known cyberattacks by an AI acting on its own. ( FT $) + Even simple AI attacks are cause for alarm, though. ( MIT Technology Review )