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Cassini Geyser-Tasting a Bust
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday March 14, @01:54PM
from the techno-ageusia dept.
from the techno-ageusia dept.
Maggie McKee writes "The Cassini spacecraft flew into the icy geysers erupting from Saturn's moon Enceladus on Wednesday in an attempt to figure out what they were made of, but a glitch prevented the probe from actually 'tasting' the plumes. An 'unexplained software hiccup' put the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) out of commission. Ironically, new software designed to improve the ability of the CDA to count particle hits may be to blame. Mission managers may try to re-attempt the plume fly-through later this year."
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We all know what this means (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:We all know what this means (Score:5, Funny)
Cassini: [message relayed from monolith] "All these worlds are yours except Enceladus. Attempt no landings there...."
glitch prevented probe from tasting the plume (Score:4, Funny)
chicken.
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But how does the probe even know what chicken tastes like? Maybe it really doesn't, so anything it tastes that it doesn't recognize it decides tastes like chicken..
Aikon-
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Irony? (Score:2, Funny)
Software (Score:2)
This isn't the first time that software changes have caused problems. Software change freezes should be in place prior to certain mission segments to allow for this sort of problem to be sorted out prior to when it goes live. At least it did
Hmmm (Score:2, Funny)
Task Manager to kill the hung process.
Sheesh... DUH.
Doomed to fail (Score:3, Funny)
One Instrument Failed! (Score:4, Informative)
CDA's failure is unfortunate to be sure, but it isn't catastrophic. Could the entire news media please stop sensationalizing this?
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Re:This stuff doesn't bode well for software (Score:5, Funny)
"It compiles! ship it!"
Re:This stuff doesn't bode well for software (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This stuff doesn't bode well for software (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just one data point in a rather big history. At least they didn't confuse feet-per-second with meters-per-second; at least they didn't cause their CPU to thrash due to a radar being left on and overloading the interrupts. Also, this is the same organization that managed to put two quite-autonomous rovers on Mars and keep them rolling for, what is it now?, 4 years. When one of the rovers did have a software failure, and a really bad mission-killing one, they were able to debug it and update firmware OTA from light-minutes distance, on a machine that was only intermittently alive.
They screw things up, but they seem to do very well at fault-tolerance and recovery, and I think if I were in automated systems, I'd wanna be at NASA over anywhere else, period.
Re:This stuff doesn't bode well for software (Score:5, Insightful)
In the meantime, the overall Cassini project has already been incredibly successful; the happy little Mars rovers have gotten unstuck by virtue of some pretty good software hacks, but you, "Phat Tony", call into question NASA's procedures.
Seriously?
Re:This stuff doesn't bode well for software (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA, in general, is a lot more stringent with its software than most organizations. If you would like to know more about it, you could start here [nasa.gov].
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Re:This stuff doesn't bode well for software (Score:4, Informative)
Hold your horses, Tex. It says in the article that they tuned the software to better pick up such particles. They may have had a big choice to keep it the way it was and play it safe, or get fancy to pick up much more data. You don't know what decisions they faced and are thus judging prematurely.
Remember, the instruments weren't originally designed for such, so they may have had to "get creative". There's always risk in exploration.
NASA has some of the best QA practices ever invented:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html [fastcompany.com]
However, it takes time and money. I doubt the Geyser team had much time, for this pass-by is relatively recent in the probe plans.
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