RobertB-DC writes "The Phoenix mission to Mars' frigid polar regions was going to be tricky from the start, with only a few weeks to perform as much science as possible. Success depended on everything working right. But one of the mission's most frustrating glitches — the stuck doors on the TEGA ovens — could have been prevented with basic quality control on Earth. Nature is reporting that bad brackets were replaced by the manufacturer ... with identically bad brackets. The Planetary Society blog sums it up succinctly: 'Ouch. Ouch ouch ouch.'"
so the problem isn't that they're being paid too little. if anything, they're being paid too much for too little work (and too little quality). if NASA contracts are handed out the same way that military contracts get handed out, then it is probably done through a corruption-filled old boy network negotiated by kickbacks and bribery. that kind of cronyism breeds incompetence as it destroys any hint of meritocracy or acco
Seriously, they should do this. Hold them to the same standards as a washing machine company. If a contractor screws up, they're going to pay for sending an engineer out there to fix the product. (And if they want him back, they can pay or that too.) If they don't want to do that, well, they can pay for a whole new mission. Then they're less likely to do things like skip diagnostics and fuck up multi-million dollar missions [wikipedia.org].
This reminds me of the the Apple iBook I have rotting in a draw somewhere, Apple acknowledged that the product had a known [apple.com] design fault, but all they did was replace the logicboard with an identical one, which of course would also fail, in my case I went through _six_ logicboards, two of them in the one go (the tech replaced it and it failed during testing so had to be replaced again before it was returned to me)
What really amazes me about this is that it is legal. This is due (in my country at least) to corrupt politicians taking too many brown paper bags full of cash in return for winding back consumer protection laws... if a manufacturer acknowledges that there is a known _design_ fault and then continues to provide the faulty product they aught at the very least be told to replace the faulty product with a _redesigned_ one without someone having to go to the trouble of filing suit. Personally, in addition to this I think the executives should also be sent to pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
And this, boys and girls, is why we don't buy Apple products.
Or anything else proprietary, for that matter. Especially for desktops. (Laptops get a bit of exception here, on the basis that they're all finicky little pricks by default.)
Were it a parts-built desktop PC with after-warranty bad caps (raise your hand if you haven't seen an Athlon XP box with bad caps), it'd have been fairly easy and inexpensive to replace the motherboard with something different of newer design.
You'll get one of two possible responses. The first response is to decline to bid on the contract at all. The second is to form a subsidiary to bid with the explicit intention of declaring bankruptcy if you try to collect on the warranty.
One more thing to add to my list why humans should be involved in space exploration, not just robots..
Perhaps this could be fixed if there was a human there?!
Face it - humans (at least, American humans representing NASA) aren't going to Mars any time soon. The bad PR from a fatal mission failure would be too much for them to overcome, so they will never try. The West is too pussy whipped by the safety police to attempt manned interplanetary exploration.
Plus, this problem could have been averted by simply checking the oven bracket design again after it came back from Honeybee. Honeybee should be sued for returning a flawed design a second time and ruining the
Some plans for a manned Mars mission were based on there not being a return trip to Earth. Anyone who went on such a mission would be marooned there on purpose. It's not a kind of trip I would like to take.
I think there would be no shortage of volunteers. And by that, I mean, millions of volunteers, including all astronauts, and everybody that wants to be one.
I'm kind of surprised to read a poster on slashdot write they wouldn't volunteer for a one-way mission.
Just run an ad in the paper saying something like this
"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success."
Evidence suggests you'll get more volunteers than you can use.
One more thing to add to my list why humans should be involved in space exploration, not just robots.. Perhaps this could be fixed if there was a human there?!
That's not a very good reason to send humans to Mars. For the difference in cost, we can send a dozen or so replacement probes before we even approach the cost of a manned mission.
We would do well to expand our orbital presence first. We need better than chemical propulsion and we need life support systems that can run as a closed system. It's much better to test that in orbit where a failure means we evacuate and try again rather than on a Mars mission where failure means transmit your last words.
No need for Antarctica for that, just as long as the environment is sealed. Such tests are underway already (plus we have expeditions in Antarctica already gaining other valuable experience).
A next step will be to build something like the equipment that will actually be used on the mission and test that on Earth, then in the ISS.
Yes, it is a horrible engineering. However these are one-off designs that never existed before and will never exist after. There is no legacy to build upon, and there is no "Release 1" to learn from. The very first release flies the mission, and if there are bugz... too bad. To confound the problem, much of this work is probably done by scientists and not by engineers; that's why if the gap between doors is above zero it's all good to go. An experienced mechanical engineer would consider thermal expansion
Boynton and his team had noticed, on a test version of TEGA, that the brackets at the bottom of this cover were just a hair's width too big, and as a result obstructed the doors. They sent revised designs for the cover to the manufacturer, Honeybee Robotics of New York. New parts were delivered and installed. But Honeybee had made the new parts using the original flawed designs -- and nobody in Tucson checked them. "They should've caught it and we should've caught it, but neither of us did," says Boynton, ruefully.
. . . which is why NASA needs to hire my mother as oven test engineer. Not only would she have noticed "hair's width" difference, she would have taken every opportunity she had to complain to everyone she knows, and even total strangers about it.
On the other hand, once the door problem got fixed, she would find something else wrong with it, and the damn thing would probably never get off the ground.
Boynton and his team had noticed, on a test version of TEGA, that the brackets at the bottom of this cover were just a hair's width too big, and as a result obstructed the doors. They sent revised designs for the cover to the manufacturer, Honeybee Robotics of New York. New parts were delivered and installed. But Honeybee had made the new parts using the original flawed designs -- and nobody in Tucson checked them. "They should've caught it and we should've caught it, but neither of us did," says Boynton, ruefully.
Doesn't NASA of all institutions have the capacity in-house to machine off a couple thou from whichever dimension was oversize?
Yeah seriously I work at a factory that makes formed insulation for electrical transformers, and I'm willing to say that just about any of our CNC machines could probly have planed down a couple thousandths from a few sides. O NASA, how we love you.
yes, but it's very hard to ACCURATELY estimate the size of the oven in the quite large temperature variations on Mars.. Don't forget the oven does expand and contract every day/night, and every time it warms itself up.
The lander wasn't made by NASA, JPL, or anyone like that. It was designed and assembled by the University of Arizona, who naturally had to get most of the parts fabbed by other folks.
I am very picky and stubborn with things. And that' why I have a job in software quality assurance (SQA). I always finds things that bother me even it is a pixel size problem.:D
``Nature is reporting that bad brackets were replaced by the manufacturer... with identically bad brackets.''
Isn't that just purely amazing? A manufacturer who _knows_ the component is bad (because it needs replacement), and then replaces it with... the same thing with the same faults. That's just unethical. I hope they are suitably punished.
Also, you would have thought that, after sending a component back for replacement, the replacement would be tested to see if the problem had been fixed.
As the saying goes. "Never attribute to malice what can be explained with incompetence."
This could well have been an issue of poor configuration management. Since the article says they used the same drawings. I imagine that even if their models were updated if those changes weren't propagated up through the drawings and the machining files used on the fabrication floor.
So the net result would be an identical part being fabbed.
Not unethical - just sloppy and incompetent. On any job there is usually one and only person who is able to anticipate problems and do "what ifs" to head off problems. Everyone else is just doing their 9-5. Clearly the spacecraft people didn't have one of those.
i am increasingly depressed by the sheer incompetence of most people in this country, from assembling hamburgers to Mars landers.
Most of the comments so far are focusing on the oven door problems. Naturally, because that's what's mentioned in the summary and no one RTFAs.
Anyway, the *much* more interesting revelation is that after the problems came up, the directive came all the way down from the top of NASA directing the mission scientists to change their plans. "At the end of June, word came down that the Phoenix team was to treat its next TEGA sample as its last, and to go after a sample of rock-hard ice before it did anything else. The Tucson team had lost its autonomy." After that, the team blew at least a month trying to meet this directive, and missed out on doing some of the basic science they wanted to do, just so NASA heads could trumpet feel-good publicity about having detected ice with Phoenix.
That *might* be true, but if it were, you'd think they'd have been asked to conduct some real science, not focus on the golly-gee-whiz-we-found-ice aspect.
Clearly what happened is that the design was made specifying a tolerances of a blonde hair, and it was built to within a red one. When will these engineers learn to be more specific!
Nature is reporting that bad brackets were replaced by the manufacturer... with identically bad brackets. The Planetary Society blog sums it up succinctly: 'Ouch. Ouch ouch ouch.'
Off-topic, and the author is an idiot. The rovers' cameras do not necessarily take pictures using the standard red-green-blue colors that we perceive. Depending on what filters were used (for scientific reasons), if you want a "full color" image for humans to appreciate, you have to choose or synthesize non-RGB channels to form an RGB image. The blue tab, for example, on the color calibration target is also very bright in the infrared, so if you use an infrared image as your red channel, what should be blue appears to be pink. All of this perfectly normal and completely expected by everyone that knows how this stuff works. Stop being a silly conspiracy theorist and apply some rational thought and a tiny bit of research [google.com].
From your Google search, I clicked the #1 result and read the following:
If I sound a little testy here, it's partly because I've found those astronomer/geologists involved to be quite arrogant. I listened to Linda Howe's interview with Steve Squyers, principal investigator on the Mars Rover Missions, during which, when the subject of organic life on Mars was brought up, he became agitated and downright rude to Howe - as if she asked a forbidden question. The reaction was appalling, certainly not something y
Other possibilities?? Maybe a thought experiment will re-activate the logic centers of your brain:
Let's say that I have three monochromatic images, each measuring the intensity of light at 430nm, 550nm, and 700nm. Your task is to turn these three images into a full-color image on a computer screen. These happen to be approximately the primary colors in the CIE RGB color space, so this should be an easy task. You just map the 430nm image to the blue layer, 550 to the green, and 700nm to the red.
Photos taken with infrared film won't be described in a camera shop as being "black and white," but simply IR. The shades presented are related to the object's reflectivity at infrared, not with visible (white) light. X-ray photos aren't black and white, either - the shades grey in an x-ray photo have nothing at all to do with the color of the objects being x-rayed.
Black and white film, along with black and white TV, are both obviously different from these -- they both work with white
Design by commitee (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Design by commitee (Score:4, Funny)
This is what happens when too many people have their hands up the engineers and by extension the technicians' asses.
Sounds like a bunch of smelly hands.
Parent
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
Sounds like they want to stink-palm somebody... mmh, chocolate pretzels...
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Sounds like a bunch of smelly hands.
Smells like a bunch of noisy hands.
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i'm pretty sure all NASA and DoD contractors are paid via cost-plus-award-fee contracts [theage.com.au].
so the problem isn't that they're being paid too little. if anything, they're being paid too much for too little work (and too little quality). if NASA contracts are handed out the same way that military contracts get handed out, then it is probably done through a corruption-filled old boy network negotiated by kickbacks and bribery. that kind of cronyism breeds incompetence as it destroys any hint of meritocracy or acco
So ? (Score:5, Funny)
Aren't they covered by warranty ? Get them to replace them.
Re:So ? (Score:5, Funny)
They'll look at you as if you came from another planet or something.
Parent
haha (Score:2)
I wonder who lost their humour by marking this a troll.
Re:haha (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe it was the Martian government trying to protect local jobs from foreign workers.
Parent
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hey i can see the tech support bill for that one.
think call center's in India are annoying?The martian centers refuse to speak any earth language.
Re:So ? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:So ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:So ? (Score:4, Insightful)
This reminds me of the the Apple iBook I have rotting in a draw somewhere, Apple acknowledged that the product had a known [apple.com] design fault, but all they did was replace the logicboard with an identical one, which of course would also fail, in my case I went through _six_ logicboards, two of them in the one go (the tech replaced it and it failed during testing so had to be replaced again before it was returned to me)
What really amazes me about this is that it is legal. This is due (in my country at least) to corrupt politicians taking too many brown paper bags full of cash in return for winding back consumer protection laws... if a manufacturer acknowledges that there is a known _design_ fault and then continues to provide the faulty product they aught at the very least be told to replace the faulty product with a _redesigned_ one without someone having to go to the trouble of filing suit. Personally, in addition to this I think the executives should also be sent to pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
Parent
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And this, boys and girls, is why we don't buy Apple products.
Or anything else proprietary, for that matter. Especially for desktops. (Laptops get a bit of exception here, on the basis that they're all finicky little pricks by default.)
Were it a parts-built desktop PC with after-warranty bad caps (raise your hand if you haven't seen an Athlon XP box with bad caps), it'd have been fairly easy and inexpensive to replace the motherboard with something different of newer design.
Alas, the 20" iMac G5 (which sou
Re: (Score:2)
Absolutely, insist on that in writing.
You'll get one of two possible responses. The first response is to decline to bid on the contract at all. The second is to form a subsidiary to bid with the explicit intention of declaring bankruptcy if you try to collect on the warranty.
But...But (Score:1)
Proverbial problem (Score:3, Funny)
Sounds like too many cooks were involved.
Without reading the article... (Score:3, Interesting)
...isn't this what happens when you gotta have it yesterday?
Human space exploration. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
Face it - humans (at least, American humans representing NASA) aren't going to Mars any time soon. The bad PR from a fatal mission failure would be too much for them to overcome, so they will never try. The West is too pussy whipped by the safety police to attempt manned interplanetary exploration.
Plus, this problem could have been averted by simply checking the oven bracket design again after it came back from Honeybee. Honeybee should be sued for returning a flawed design a second time and ruining the
Human Mars mission (Score:4, Informative)
You are forgetting something ...
Some plans for a manned Mars mission were based on there not being a return trip to Earth. Anyone who went on such a mission would be marooned there on purpose. It's not a kind of trip I would like to take.
Parent
Re:Human Mars mission (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm kind of surprised to read a poster on slashdot write they wouldn't volunteer for a one-way mission.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Just run an ad in the paper saying something like this
"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success."
Evidence suggests you'll get more volunteers than you can use.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
One more thing to add to my list why humans should be involved in space exploration, not just robots.. Perhaps this could be fixed if there was a human there?!
That's not a very good reason to send humans to Mars. For the difference in cost, we can send a dozen or so replacement probes before we even approach the cost of a manned mission.
We would do well to expand our orbital presence first. We need better than chemical propulsion and we need life support systems that can run as a closed system. It's much better to test that in orbit where a failure means we evacuate and try again rather than on a Mars mission where failure means transmit your last words.
Once we h
Re: (Score:2)
why not start the test in Antarctida first ?
No need for Antarctica for that, just as long as the environment is sealed. Such tests are underway already (plus we have expeditions in Antarctica already gaining other valuable experience).
A next step will be to build something like the equipment that will actually be used on the mission and test that on Earth, then in the ISS.
Hm... (Score:1)
"were just a hair's width too big"
and is obstructing the door??? that's some horrible engineering.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
My Mother, NASA oven test engineer . . . (Score:5, Funny)
From the blog:
Boynton and his team had noticed, on a test version of TEGA, that the brackets at the bottom of this cover were just a hair's width too big, and as a result obstructed the doors. They sent revised designs for the cover to the manufacturer, Honeybee Robotics of New York. New parts were delivered and installed. But Honeybee had made the new parts using the original flawed designs -- and nobody in Tucson checked them. "They should've caught it and we should've caught it, but neither of us did," says Boynton, ruefully.
. . . which is why NASA needs to hire my mother as oven test engineer. Not only would she have noticed "hair's width" difference, she would have taken every opportunity she had to complain to everyone she knows, and even total strangers about it.
On the other hand, once the door problem got fixed, she would find something else wrong with it, and the damn thing would probably never get off the ground.
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From the blog:
Boynton and his team had noticed, on a test version of TEGA, that the brackets at the bottom of this cover were just a hair's width too big, and as a result obstructed the doors. They sent revised designs for the cover to the manufacturer, Honeybee Robotics of New York. New parts were delivered and installed. But Honeybee had made the new parts using the original flawed designs -- and nobody in Tucson checked them. "They should've caught it and we should've caught it, but neither of us did," says Boynton, ruefully.
Doesn't NASA of all institutions have the capacity in-house to machine off a couple thou from whichever dimension was oversize?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:My Mother, NASA oven test engineer . . . (Score:4, Informative)
The lander wasn't made by NASA, JPL, or anyone like that. It was designed and assembled by the University of Arizona, who naturally had to get most of the parts fabbed by other folks.
Parent
Sounds like me. (Score:2)
I am very picky and stubborn with things. And that' why I have a job in software quality assurance (SQA). I always finds things that bother me even it is a pixel size problem. :D
Amazing (Score:3, Interesting)
``Nature is reporting that bad brackets were replaced by the manufacturer... with identically bad brackets.''
Isn't that just purely amazing? A manufacturer who _knows_ the component is bad (because it needs replacement), and then replaces it with ... the same thing with the same faults. That's just unethical. I hope they are suitably punished.
Also, you would have thought that, after sending a component back for replacement, the replacement would be tested to see if the problem had been fixed.
I just don't have words anymore.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This could well have been an issue of poor configuration management. Since the article says they used the same drawings. I imagine that even if their models were updated if those changes weren't propagated up through the drawings and the machining files used on the fabrication floor.
So the net result would be an identical part being fabbed.
Re: (Score:2)
Not unethical - just sloppy and incompetent. On any job there is usually one and only person who is able to anticipate problems and do "what ifs" to head off problems. Everyone else is just doing their 9-5. Clearly the spacecraft people didn't have one of those.
i am increasingly depressed by the sheer incompetence of most people in this country, from assembling hamburgers to Mars landers.
documentation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I am not a number; I am a free man!
manglement (Score:3, Informative)
Most of the comments so far are focusing on the oven door problems. Naturally, because that's what's mentioned in the summary and no one RTFAs.
Anyway, the *much* more interesting revelation is that after the problems came up, the directive came all the way down from the top of NASA directing the mission scientists to change their plans. "At the end of June, word came down that the Phoenix team was to treat its next TEGA sample as its last, and to go after a sample of rock-hard ice before it did anything else. The Tucson team had lost its autonomy." After that, the team blew at least a month trying to meet this directive, and missed out on doing some of the basic science they wanted to do, just so NASA heads could trumpet feel-good publicity about having detected ice with Phoenix.
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That *might* be true, but if it were, you'd think they'd have been asked to conduct some real science, not focus on the golly-gee-whiz-we-found-ice aspect.
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Wrong units of measurement strike again. (Score:2)
Marvin (Score:2)
Nature is reporting that bad brackets were replaced by the manufacturer ... with identically bad brackets. The Planetary Society blog sums it up succinctly: 'Ouch. Ouch ouch ouch.'
Not to mention the diodes down its left side.
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
I'll just leave this [ericisgreat.com] here.
Re:NASA might be tampering with photos (Score:5, Informative)
Off-topic, and the author is an idiot. The rovers' cameras do not necessarily take pictures using the standard red-green-blue colors that we perceive. Depending on what filters were used (for scientific reasons), if you want a "full color" image for humans to appreciate, you have to choose or synthesize non-RGB channels to form an RGB image. The blue tab, for example, on the color calibration target is also very bright in the infrared, so if you use an infrared image as your red channel, what should be blue appears to be pink. All of this perfectly normal and completely expected by everyone that knows how this stuff works. Stop being a silly conspiracy theorist and apply some rational thought and a tiny bit of research [google.com].
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/hoagland/mars_colors.html [badastronomy.com]
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/spirit/a12_20040128.html [nasa.gov]
Parent
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Other possibilities?? Maybe a thought experiment will re-activate the logic centers of your brain:
Let's say that I have three monochromatic images, each measuring the intensity of light at 430nm, 550nm, and 700nm. Your task is to turn these three images into a full-color image on a computer screen. These happen to be approximately the primary colors in the CIE RGB color space, so this should be an easy task. You just map the 430nm image to the blue layer, 550 to the green, and 700nm to the red.
Now I han
Re: (Score:2)
Here are the filters available to the Mars rover camera:
http://www.ominous-valve.com/pancam.html [ominous-valve.com]
There's also a picture of the color calibration target through each of these filters. Fire up Gimp and do some mixing and matching.
Re: (Score:2)
Depends on the film.
Photos taken with infrared film won't be described in a camera shop as being "black and white," but simply IR. The shades presented are related to the object's reflectivity at infrared, not with visible (white) light. X-ray photos aren't black and white, either - the shades grey in an x-ray photo have nothing at all to do with the color of the objects being x-rayed.
Black and white film, along with black and white TV, are both obviously different from these -- they both work with white