Mars Camera's Worsening Eye Problems 93
Mr_Foo writes "According to a Nature article, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE imager is suffering from a loss of peripheral vision. The problem surfaced less than a month after the orbiter reached Mars. One the camera's four color detectors has completely stopped working, and it is feared that the problems are spreading. Currently seven of the fourteen HiRISE's detectors are sending back corrupted data and although the issue is only creating a 2% loss of signal at this time it is expected to worsen. The lead investigator for the mission is quoted as saying the problem is systemic: 'In the broken detectors, extra peaks and troughs are somehow being introduced, causing... a "ringing" in the signal. "We don't know where the ringing is coming from," [the investigator] says.' Warming the electronics before taking images seems to help the problem. This effect might be one reason why the detectors on the cold periphery of the array were the first to pack up."
Re:Surpising? No. (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA was a governmental agency when they successfully landed human beings on the moon and brought them safely back to earth. They were a governmental agency when they sent out Voyager 1, currently leaving the solar system and still operational after thirty years. Certainly NASA's administration appears to have been getting a bit top-heavy of late, but it's short-sighted to put that down to the simple fact of NASA being a governmental agency.
The fact is, space exploration is hard. Things go wrong all the time, on both commercial and government-agency missions. For a far more dramatic commercial-sector cock-up, you only have to look back two weeks to the latest Sea Launch disaster [spaceflightnow.com].
I'm all for private investment in space, but as far as I know no commercial mission has yet made it out of Earth's gravity well. Good luck to Burt Rutan et al., but I think it'll be a while before they land anyone on the moon, or get a probe as far as Mars.
Re: Surprising? Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, the office of operations is more into the financial stuff than the technical stuff. That'd be like asking Linus Torvald's banker about the next Linux release.
Third, although NASA is a governmental agency, is has a disproportionate number of extremely intelligent and driven engineers and scientists on board. This is evidenced by the simple fact that although we have put millions of dollars into orbit around Mars, people *expect* it to work perfectly every time. The reason we're looking up there is that we *don't* know everything; perhaps these problems indicate an unexpected radiation belt or dust belt around Mars; maybe the problem was during the aerobraking which somehow didn't go as expected.
To simply blame it on the bureaucracy inherent in any large organization is intellectually indolent at best. Any undertaking this huge will, by its very nature, involve many people doing many different things, and as such will be infested with bureaucracy. This does not mean that all such projects are doomed to failure by way of miscommunication;quite the opposite in fact.
From your post:
I used to date the daughter of the Vice President of Operations at Nasa.
Please do not take your failings in communication out on NASA.
what is it about mars (Score:3, Insightful)