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Did NASA Know Mars Polar Lander Would Fail?
RELEASE: 00-43
NASA'S RESPONSE TO UPI'S MARCH 21 MARS POLAR LANDER STORY
James Oberg of UPI claims that NASA knew there was a problem with the Mars Polar Lander propulsion system prior to the Dec. 3 landing attempt and "withheld this conclusion from the public." NASA categorically denies this charge. Here's what NASA did and what NASA said:
* The Stephenson report, phase 1, was released to the public on November 10, 1999 during a press conference at NASA Headquarters.
* The report made 11 different references to technical issues or concerns involving the propulsion system and the Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) sequence.
* This issue was specifically addressed in the press conference and in "MPL Observation No. 5" and other public recommendations of the Stephenson Phase 1 report. It was entitled, "Cold Firing of Thrusters," and dealt in detail with the catalyst bed issue cited by Mr. Oberg of UPI in his March 21 story, "NASA Knew Mars Polar Lander Doomed."
* Had UPI researched the public documents released on Nov. 10, which have been available online at the NASA Home Page, the reporter would have been able to conclude that NASA did indeed publicly address propulsion issues, and specifically, the propulsion system's "catalyst bed" temperature concern.
* Based on this review, NASA knew about the concerns with the propulsion system, NASA took corrective action, and NASA hid nothing from the public. We made our concerns known in early November.
* Several failure scenarios have been reported in the press over the last few weeks, including the lander legs microswitch issue. Outlets such as the Denver Post, Space Daily, and National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" have covered this angle. There is nothing new in the UPI report relating to this specific issue. The lander legs issue is among the failure modes we are studying.
* Both the Stephenson and Casani (John Casani, retired JPL flight programs head and also director of mission assurance) teams have conducted intensive reviews relating to Mars Polar Lander, and their teams have surfaced no evidence relating to thruster acceptance testing irregularities as alleged by UPI. In fact, members of the review teams are using words like "bunk," "complete nonsense," and "wacko," to describe their reactions to UPI's charge.
Ha. The B-2 works, and is keeping me safe from nuclear armageddon.
Besides, the B-2 is justifiable under the constitution, where congress can raise an army. Your little spacenerd friends have no such protection.
If you're going to steal 30% of my income, it had better get some fucking results.
Preventing nuclear armageddon is one such result. Crashing widgets into Mars is not.
Just a suggestion, but you should post in html format If you are going to include hyperlinks.
"And for those who think $150 million is some sort of monumental waste, how much does one B1 bomber cost? A lot more than the entire Mars Polar Lander project..."
Yah. A lot more. That's because the B-1 is designed to kill people in a far off land and keep us safe, so the spacenerds have a chance to lob defective widgets at the Martians.
Get off it, people. Arguments about how much it costs do not negate the fact that an error occurred. Oh, Vietnam was a mistake, but it only cost 50,000 lives, not the hundreds of thousands of the War Between the States. What utter crap!!
Better still, "Oh, I pissed away $1000 on slot machines, but it's nothing compared to what I pay on my mortgage."
Bullshit. That money came from my paycheck. It came from your paycheck. It could have helped thousands of people to own their own cars or homes (or Linux systems), but NASA took it from their paycheck.
And all you apologists can say is, "sure, NASA wastes a lot of money and makes big mistakes, but at least they don't waste as much as the Air Force."
WTF???? That's my money, geekboy. I'll decide what causes are worthy. Taking pictures of the Martians ain't one of them.
Good GOD are you an idiot. "More guns! More bombs! Who needs space exploration?! That's for wussies!" Whatever. Maybe you want to see the United States end up as the backwater of the 21st Century but I don't.
At least that money kept those young PhDs off the street. You never know what sort of trouble you'd have with shiftless Engineers roaming the neighborhoods. You never know until it's too late.
NASA has been infiltrated by Martian spies.
Were there any other notable space events that happened during that time when everyone was waiting for the initial images to come from the Mars lander? Any interesting spy satellite launches, for instance?
People WANTED to watch Titanic. No one cares about NASA. Titanic provided me with entertainment. NASA can't even do that. Blather on all you want about the scientific discoveries they make but I'd still betting if you gave their budget to a more useful agency or private institution you would get more bang for you buck, you would just lose the the bogus prestige that goes with space. It would also help if NASA and its proponents could present a decent reason for why space exploration is important other than "it is cool".
NASA used Linux. Idiot.
Your portion of the bill for the MPL (assuming you pay taxes) is about one dollar. I hope you don't have this reaction every time you lose a buck.
Contemptuously:"Oh, I pissed away $1000 on slot machines, but it's nothing compared to what I pay on my mortgage."
Keeping things in perspective is a bad thing? If I miss an offramp and burn and extra 15 cents worth of gas, I'm supposed to freak out as if my house burned down? "WTF????" indeed.
Hmmm - does anyone have a blocking program that blocks that cuz it contains "sex"? :)
If they gave me the 13 billion, I'd put it to much better use.
Good GOD you are a fuckstick! No country has traveled farther in space than the US. And no country has kept the peace better than the US - with its expensive bombers and guns.
I was about ready to call and bitch at my friend who was working on the MPL, until I read this.
So basically the story is bullshit. Also see: this story in the Houston Chronicle from November.
You might also want to see the Jim Oberg UPI story that started this brouhaha, and the followup with NASA's reaction ("whacko" -- although he does confirm the landing gear microswitch problem).
I apologize for the lame quality of these last two sites; I can't seem to find any good sites that carry UPI stories. I wonder why that is...
Hehehe.
Umm.. no. You're not funny, and that's that. Twit.
Really? That fucker had kids? Ugh.
Let's see some evidence for these oft-repeated but never-proved claims. I'm highly skeptical.
Maybe.
Give this boy some GRANT money!
Daddy never took you kids to the circus.
NASA is failing because it will go to any
to ENTERTAIN THE PUBLIC. NASA is not in the
space exploration business, they have captured
the attention of the public.
When NASA is successful & we have colonies
on the moon etc, space will be handled by
the State Dept. & private industry. This will
NEVER happen. If you like floppy shoes & red
faces but don't give a damn for the economic
growth of return on our space dollars, NASA
is the way to go. While your sitting watching
Punch & Judy, Everybody with a few million
bucks is plying the solar system in NUCLEAR
ion drive saucers mapping out their next
fortunes, while you kids become cyber surfs.
[Will they let you hook up today?]
MICROWAVE LASERS can put
a lump in a politically
active chest. Aluminum foil
can stop it. [& radar absorbing paint]
.. I was jerking off
This article is as much about leaked information as it is a secret who are the current candidates for presidency.
Where was Sirius when this happened?
Can you Beowulf Beowulfs?
Thank you, my friend: Now i know what a grit is.
And do what? Buy a bunch of real dolls, and pour hot grits down your pants?
Yeah, shut up! Your narrow-minded opinion has no place here! All Slashdotters are open minded (especially about OS'es). p.s. HOT GRITS take me away....
The Earth is doomed. One day we will use us all our resorces. It will happen... Don't fool yourslef into thinking that if we spend all our money on the rainforest and cute, fuzzy animals that they will still be around 10,000 years from now. Colonizing other planets may be our only hope of surviving for thousands of years in the future...
Look at it this way: It only took us 100 years to take our oil supply down as far as we have... Now we only have oil for 30 more years. Any and all other resources will eventualy fall victim to this same process.
It's because Pat Robertson & his gang bought UPI, that's why. Enough gets reported to make big press on the 700 Club and support Pat's NWO the apocalypse is coming point of view and to keep the money rollin' in.
...the biggest flaw with this reasoning I have is that it would suggest that the only future path for oceanic research would be through the good will and graces of SeaWorld (an Anheuser-Busch company...), or that the only way to "preserve" Africa is with pseuso-museums like the big Africa-esque park at DisneyWorld.
Of course, that fits in that most people who go to museums, etc., do not go there to learn, but to be titillated/entertained. Why go to the Field Museum, the Art Institute, or whatever in Chicago when you can go to the ESPNZone (part of the Go Network!) instead?
And think what be/would have been added to the body of knowledge when that Pizza Hut rocket launches, or if Swatch had gone through with its hijacking of amateur radio satellites...
From the Apollo I fire (http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/Apollo2 04/content.html), to the Challenger accident (http://www.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/doc s/rogers-commission/table-of-contents.ht ml), NASA has had a pretty good track record of putting everything out before the public and "letting the chips fall where they may" when something really bad has happened. These types of reports tend to find several things wrong, and usually anyone of them could have resulted in loss of the spacecraft.
I think it would be far better to wait for the report to come out (rumoured to be next week), before commenting on this anonymous source inspired BBC report.
we here at razormaid technologies would like to extend our thanks to you too my dear A.C.
may your grits always be warm.
with one simple little word:
Doh!
why, oh why, is there not a negative moderation category for "not funny"? I mean, this post is topic, not -really- flamebait, not a troll, and barely redundant, so how do I get rid of it? I guess it is possibly overrated since he used his damned +1 bonus on it, but otherwise...
NOTE 3: if you have to tell people your post was meant to be funny, you didn't do a good enough job.
NASA must not fail, how else are we going to survive as a species after we trash this place?
It's not like you haven't known about this for ages.
sheesh.
...is that you and I are bob. the stupid ones whose money is being used to dig holes and fill them up (in this case on mars). Jim and Fred are brilliant people, of which there is a shortage in the world; if these people are preoccupied drilling $180M holes in celestial bodies they won't spend much time inventing things to make my life better.
How many engineers has NASA employed over the last 40 years? And how much do we have to show for it? IMHO the list is pretty darn short compared to what it could be. (ask yourself why NASA et. al. have to fund sbir's... an r&d group that has to go to outside sources for innovative ideas is not an effective organization)
(_)(_)//////D~~~~~~Moderation
If it was made to fail, people would find out sooner or later.
NASA has a tarnished image as it is, and wouldn't gain by covering up the truth - only lose. So what if they knew....the little bugger did more to raise interest in Mars than many other things did, so in the long run (when my grandkids are sitting on Mars) it doesn't matter if one lander failed, IMHO.
Like grits? Who doesnt!
You got Biotch! You'ze a punk ass 8th post. Trick GRITS!
GRITS GRITS GRITS!
Ha! Ha! Hahaha.. [wipe tears from eyes].. Sorry, at $500m they'd be flying off the shelf (excuse the pun). Lookey here.
MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov
Mars Polar Lander Mission Status
November 8, 1999
Engineers say they are close to resolving a potential problem on NASA's Mars Polar Lander uncovered by the NASA panel appointed to investigate the recent loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter.
The NASA investigation board, chaired by Art Stephenson, director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., found that cold temperatures could affect the performance Mars Polar Lander's descent engine, which begins firing at about 2 kilometers (about 1.5 miles) altitude during the descent to Mars surface. As a result of the finding, a team of engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has developed procedures to warm up the engine system prior to firing. In addition, the team has analyzed descent engine performance at a range of temperatures to assess its predicted performance upon arrival.
Updated operations plans call for turning on propellant system heaters several hours prior to the spacecraft's entry into Mars' atmosphere. This strategy will increase the expected temperature of the descent engines to 8 degrees Celsius (46.4 degrees Fahrenheit). Analysis indicates that at this temperature, the engines will perform as designed.
Ground-based testing of an actual descent engine was conducted last week at the descent engine manufacturer's test facility. The initial test results suggest acceptable engine start-up performance is achieved when the catalyst bed, where engine firing initiates, is at temperatures as low as -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit). More ground-based test firings are scheduled to better characterize engine performance at various temperatures.
On Wed., Nov. 10, NASA will release the investigation board findings on the loss of Mars Climate Orbiter and recommendations for the Mars Polar Lander mission, which lands on Mars Dec. 3.
Mars Polar Lander successfully performed its third course correction on Oct. 30, and another maneuver to fine-tune the flight path is scheduled for Nov. 30. The spacecraft remains in good health.
On Nov. 1, the spacecraft's landing radar system was turned on for the first time since launch and successfully performed its internal self-test. Test results show the unit's integrity is sound, and all electrical functional test results were within the expected range. The landing radar will not be turned on again until landing day. The radar system is activated just after separation of the lander's heat shield, following parachute deployment, and begins searching for the surface. Once the system recognizes the Martian surface, it must generate data for approximately 60 seconds, providing altitude and velocity measurements to the spacecraft's onboard guidance system for powered descent.
Mars Climate Orbiter was lost as it was entering orbit around Mars on Sept. 23. The orbiter and lander are part of a series of missions in a long-term program of Mars exploration managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. JPL's industrial partner is Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, Colo. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.
Well.. I'm a NASA employee and I can account for hundreds of engineers that didn't "know" about this. There's quite a lot of people (both contractors and civil servants) that work on the craft's thrusters alone. Surely -they- would speak out for the article's legitimacy. Right? Of course not -- because they don't exist. People that actually listen to the media should be shot for being too easy to control/brainwash.
I was thinking, and I think that we really need a beowulf cluster of mars landers, because it would be really fast and good and if i could get donations things would be really cool, if you're interested, please email me @ ed@govsci.com
NASA doesn't spend huge amounts of money compared to most other government programs. Around 1995 NASA's budget was about $13 billion (I believe) while welfare was at about $70 billion. These guys do incredible things with their thin wallet, lets give them credit.
There might have been a large amount of embezzlement on project funds. Read the article here
George Dunham explains how certain people within NASA falsified accounting and used inferior parts(ie Win 2k hehe) to build the Lander. It makes sense..I mean, who can prove it something is what they say it is, when the evidence is up in space?
P1 from day one
Actually this was rumored on http://www.nasawatch.com before the Polar Lander went down (landed/crashed, you make the call). http://www.spacedaily.com/spacecast/news/mars-pola r99-99g.html The real question should be why does NASA deny press credentials for those that do investigative reporting on them. Check out the responce to Keith Cowing (as in broke the shuttle wiring story, one of the first to break the Metric mix up story, ect). http://www.reston.com/nasa/pao/08.04.99.wilhide.ht ml Oh some other web links on this story http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNe ws/mars000322.html http://www.msnbc.com/news/354220.asp http://www.marketwatch.newsalert.com/bin/story?Sto ryId=ConCb0bebDxmTBwfYC2nYyxnO&FQ=Mars&T itle=Headlines%20for%3A%20Mars%0A
"You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity."
What did NASA have to gain? Public image, people. Stupid errors led to the destruction of one probe (metric-English conversion error). Stupid errors have led to the destruction of the Polar Lander (re-defining test conditions, failure to conduct end-to-end test).
Both are deep middle management errors, of the sort that give Dilbert wet dreams. By delaying this report, they might be able to find fault in some other system (micrometeroites, anyone?), thus letting themselves off the hook. This is classic middle management denial, not conspiracy.
When your reputation determines how much $$ congress will give you, you'd damn well better believe that NASA will withold any evidence of incompetence.
does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: 3
1 to see the lighbulb is dead, and file the press release,
1 to use a radiotelescope to see if the bulb might actually still be working, and
1 to redefine conditions so that in the future, the "ambient electromagnetic emitter" is tested with the switch in the OFF position.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
It makes it so much more INTERESTING for the reader!
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
Bureaucratic paranoia?
However, concerning the latest information about the engine temperature problem, it appears that they had developed and publicized a procedure to preheat the engine just before the landing attempt.
I recently read the second book of Richard Feynman annecdotes (I can't remember the title), of which over half is dedicated to the research he did as part of the commission to research the Challenger accident. He tells of numerous places where documentation was in error, or tests were performed inaccurately, etc. This was of course 15 years ago, so a lot could have changed, but NASA definitely has a history of having screwed up, particularly when it comes to communication between depts, etc.
I think that price also includes a lot of R&D stuff that's applicable to other programs (like F-117, F-22, etc...); rather than have a separate R&D budget, they just dumped it all into the B2 program. And everything else gets to look cheaper. They did this with other programs in the past.
But anyway, the basic point about economy of scale still holds.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
I'm not sure that MPL cost 5% of what a B-2 bomber would cost; that would make it... roughly 2 billion per plane, and I think it was closer to 500 million. The thing that went wrong with the B-2 was that they spent all the money developing the thing and then ran less than a dozen off of a production line. Thankfully, they're going to use the tech in planes with much better chances of getting economy of scale, and learn from their mistakes.
Why do I bring this up now? Well, NASA makes the same mistake we did when we built the B-2; they don't mass-produce space probes nearly as much as they should. They build all these onesies and twosies and they get the same false economy vibes the Air Force got when they cut back the B-2 order.
I think this sort of false economy also colors their launch vehicle development processes; take Venturestar, for instance; the first orbital vehicle would be able to carry about as much payload as the shuttle, according to the pretty viewgraphs, but shouldn't they wait until they have the tech right before trying to scale it up?
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Agreed, but there is always a chance that when it starts to hurt to old national pride that maybe somebody will start investing more $$. After all, wasn't it mostly national pride that drove the race to the moon?
Personally, I think space exploration and travel will, in the not too distant future, become more and more a commercial venture. As soon as corporations begin to discover extraterrestrial valuables (whatever they may be) we'll begin to see a lot of them rushing up to space to stake their claim.
-Derek
...maybe it was a way to say to the US Congress, "Look, we obviously can't produce good results on such a small budget. Give us the money that we need or else we'll make American technology look even more deficient."
I doubt it, but it is possible....
-Derek
fix your posting. It's not like you haven't known about this for ages. Not very subtle for a troll/flamebait but to risk getting moderated into Offtopic-ness: you don't correct a problem by ignoring it. Bugs are supposed to be fixed, not avoided.
Defense of this ridiculous aligation should hardly be necessary. There are 100's of people just like "stab" who put their all into these very risky projects. When they are successful, like Mars Pathfinder, we all get the impression that the missions are easy. Being formerly involved with the Voyager and Galileo projects myself I can say the the people who do spacecraft engineering are extraordinarily skilled and cunning.
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and again...
NASA should stop spending money on the exploration of Mars and instead spend it on the eradication of rain forests and cute, furry animals. Take the pledge today. There is no problem so big that it can't be solved with a few million tons of asphalt.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
What does that tell us?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Reminds me of that quote from the movie Contact. "Why build one multi-billion dollar machine if you can have two for twice the price". Well, something to that effect at least. :)
/. wise-crack: Gee, I wonder when somone will build a Beowulf cluster of Mars Polar Landers??
You raise an excellent point though. With NASA's policy of cheaper, faster, better, they really ought (IMHO) to pelt the solar system with dozens, if not hundreds of probes. Guarantee misson success through redundancy. Gather data in parallel.
Obligatory
Seriously though, cutting corners is good and fine, if you don't keep all the eggs in one basket. The NASA policy makers are doing the right thing by developing cheaper probes, but they still seem caught in the 'Cowboy Mentality' of the lone-star probe. Voyager and Gallileo and Pioneer were great, but the singular, focused effort belongs in HUMAN exploration.
You just CAN'T send dozens of people to Mars, and hope one makes it. But building a bunch of Yugo-sized, disposable probes... Seems common-sense.
As for the B-2, this enthusiasts page cites a $2.2 billion price tag, along with some interesting specs.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Yeah, it was a shame.
Management and administration at NASA, and in the corporate arena, seem to share a flawed way of thinking. They estimate, budget and plan based on a 'best-case' scenario, and if things fall short, run late, or go over budget, it's the techies fault for 'not doing their job'... Do I sound bitter?
The technoids were very nervous about Challenger's last flight, but management pushed it through anyway. Cancelling the flight would have 'looked bad'. Well, seven people and a symbol of American and human ingenuity went up in smoke.
Thing is, poo-poo occurs, and you're much more likely to live up to expectations if you acknowledge that something invariably goes wrong. Risks must be mitigated and if you must err, err on the side of safety.
A common failing in software development is that corners MUST be cut to bring the project back on schedule and within budget. Doing this while the project is in progress usually means cutting down on the completion-work, like testing. This is why there's so much buggy software out there. Testing was scaled down to shorten schedules and reign in budgets.
Unfortunatelly, this tendency seems to have contaminated the ultimate think-tank in the world, NASA. You don't send a probe to a planet 6 to 18 months away, without testing your landing capability. And retesting, and retesting. Landing is sort of a crucial step, no?
Either it was an unavoidable failure, odd-ball happenstance and bad luck, OR someone didn't prioritize risks correctly, and should be working for Microsoft.
You're right, $180 mil is not cheap, not to us. But it's a drop in the bucket. Personally, I think NASA's bucket should be a lot bigger than it is, so corners like LANDING wouldn't have to get cut.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
The Official Mars Polar Lander website:
Here
Oh, shut up. Not more of you people again!
Did endless social problems ever stand in the way of world exploration? Just think about how many things come from the technological research required for space travel. Besides, what makes more sense? Throwing more money at the unfixable social problems of Earth, or extending the grasp of the human race into the stars? One day there may be no Earth. Should that really be the end of humanity?
I'd been wondering (publicly at Launchpad magazine) why the probes didn't return a signal. If the thrusters blew the whole thing to shreds, it wouldn't have time to deploy them and they'd smack down in a tangled pile of the rubbish.
:v)
Funny nobody talked about the probes, eh? From the reports NASA was putting out you'd have thought that they'd forgot to attach them or something. I guess this explains it.
Vik
This is almost invariably catastrophic - contractors have different agendas from scientists, and once the contract is secured, they often don't want to do more than the absolute minimum necessary to fulfil it. Successful projects send scientists out to live at the contractor plant, and to read them the Riot Act on a bi-weekly basis.
I have worked under contract to the US government (albeit not NASA), and must concur. Contractors have a different agenda than most morally-grounded individuals, let alon the scientists.
I knew during the course of my job, that neither my employer, nor the bulk of my co-workers should under any circumstaces be left unsupervised. The contractors SOLE motivation is to maximize their profit. They simply do not CARE what becomes of their work.
Contractors often land jobs with claims of huge cost savings, which invariably are created through shoddy workmanship, falsified testing, employing unqualified workers to handle tasks beyond their ability, failure to pay suppliers, failure to pay employees... It's a big list, so I'll stop there. Eventually, the worst abusers ARE identified, but at a HUGE cost.
As pointed out in the article, NASA only knew that the project would fail when it was well beyond anyone's power to do anything about it. What purpose would it have served to reveal that information and declare the project a failure? Had they done so, there would only be suspicion that a problem had occured. Playing out the mission to the failure point allows NASA to actively persue those responsible.
No, I won't shut up. That's my opinion wether you like it or not. And I do not believe looking at microbes on mars rocks is very productive. And Yes, if the end of humanity comes at the end of sunlight, well I'll be glad to know that we aren't the idiots who have extinct our own race.
Many may consider this a troll or something, but I find there's a huge waste of money in these types of projects vs. the scientific and technological advancements they procure. Wouldn't these huge amounts of money be better spent researching disease cures and helping develop countries and savin' our trees???
Before finding out if life existed on Mars, hou about they try to save life on Earth before it becomes extinct!
I believe the point of this article is that the error wasn't detected until well after launch time. The error was detected a few days before the landing, and nothing could be done about it.
What was to be gained by keeping it a secret? I should think that the scientists went into CYA mode.
They're sitting there thinking, "What would be gained by going to the press and saying that we KNOW it won't land?"
"We've called you here today to announce that we screwed up. We've detected a fatal flaw, and Mars Polar Lander, instead of doing lots of cool stuff, will instead crash and burn, in what would be a beautiful fiery display. Unfortunately, this display will take place far out of our sight, thus robbing us of even the chance to get a sneak preview of the great Iridium Superburn."
Alternately, they could have waited until it burned up, and announce that they knew all along it would happen.
CYA. It isn't always right, and it doesn't always work, but sometimes it is all you have.
paperbacks.homepage.com
Visit Lockjaw's Lair. He won't bite.
First off, let me say I read stab's excellent post ("I worked there, and I find it Hard to Believe") and I completely agree with what he says there. I, too, find it difficult to believe this story. But I am interested in why such a story is given credence enough to be published.
I agree. You don't see too many geeks try to cover things up when things go wrong. Failure is best used as a learning experience. Most geeks won't take the time to make up a story, it would be distracting and hard to remember later. The truth is the easiest thing to remember.
Roger Beaujolais lives with that moment every day of his life. So do all the men and women of NASA.
Amen. I still can't watch the Challenger accident in replays. Every time I see it coming, I run out of the room if possible. I was really hoping to get into space someday, but with the Challenger accident, I don't think we'll see civilians is space anytime soon. John Glen doesn't count. Remember, he was a trained astronaut.
Chirstine Macauliff
Christine Macauliffe, IRRC.
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
My point was that each probe is designed and built separately from others. There is no standard "Mars Lander" device, so for each probe the engineers have to re-apply lessons learned: heat the explosive bolts so they'll operate properly, force liquids against pump intake ports, anchor cables well to avoid oscillations, shield power cables from EM/photon sensitive devices...etc. The engineers try very hard to deal with all the issues, but they have to start from paper and build up rather than having tested designs to literally build upon.
It's not easy engineering. Anyone can see some examples in the Space Mechanisms Lessons Learned Study. Miss one lesson, or discover a new one, and there's no way to fix what you already built...
'What Do You Care What Other People Think?' : Further Adventures of a Curious Character
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
did microsoft know that windows would suck?!?!?
Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
I believe the technical reason for this was that the MPL had sensors in its landing gear to stop the rockets when they hit something, such as ground. Unfortunately, they managed to trigger from contact with the atmosphere. Both systems were tested out (reentry and landing) independently, but due to time and budget constraints - they were not able to run end-to-end testing.
SNAFU
That makes no sense. If they knew the lander was fatally flawed, why wouldn't they change its mission to salvage some research dollars? Maybe adjust its course so it goes into orbit, instead of crashing? Or adjusting its course so it crashes in full view of the Hubble Telescope's cameras?
Imagine if NASA were to call a press conference to announce that the Lander can't land and will be allowed to go into orbit in hopes that they can use it for some other purpose. Or that they'll deliberately crash it to study atmospheric effects. This would have been a much better form of CYA then just going, "Whoops! We lost the Lander, we'll waste a crapload of resources just to make sure we're not wrong, but basically, we're screwed."
Does this
... that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
... that the problem was known before the vehicle was ever assembled, let alone launched. That's when it should have been brought out, and fixed.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
A B-2's price depends on how you want to count.
The US government spent $44.4 billion dollars over about 15 years to get 20 aircraft. If you do a simple division you get a price of $2.2 billion per aircraft. But there are lots of costs that are included in that $44.4 billion that have nothing to do with the airframe; support equipment, facilities and up-front technology development costs.
That's why people have more than one "legitimate" price tag for this (or any other) government-developed airplane (or anything else). The $500 million price quoted by Northrop management whenever the US Congress debated buying more B-2s was most likely a "time and materials" price to get an airframe built, tested and delivered to the USAF.
So, pick your initial conditions and get the price you want, I suppose.
The "enthusiast's page" referenced by someone else on this thread is a poor source of information. I read it and was very unimpressed.
By the way, I spent 10 years on the B-2 program (1986 to 1996) and was the lead engineer for the weapon control, targeting and release software.
Then, of course, landing comes closer, and we are glutted with money from NASA. But what's the point? We get 10 sysadmins one month before landing, and we have to spend hours training them up; much more preferable to have had one good one ten months before!
I hate the inconsistency of this. Far better to give NASA a fixed budget of sufficient funds to tackle all of their projects and let you folks handle how its spent. This is supposed to be about science, not political maneuvering to gain sufficient funds to complete projects - and then getting the funds too late to be of use.
For my part, the exploration of space is the most important challenge facing humanity, we should be spending whatever is necessary to make it possible. The scientific spinoffs from space exploration have had a tremendous impact on a multitude of industries worldwide, and the benefits easily outweigh the costs associated. Besides, its not like the money isn't spent here on earth :)
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
How sad that one has to read so far down to see your post, which is the funniest of them all! Ha!
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
Sigh. I know, but it's still a lot of dough for a crash landing. 180 million is not chump change.
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
NASA is still testing technologies, so failures should be expected
True - and that certainly fits the pattern of all other human endeavors to date, particularly in the sciences. However I wonder a bit about that, since according to the article:
But rather than begin an expensive redesign and replacement program, an unnamed space official is said by the source to have altered the test conditions to make it look as though the engines would perform in the conditions expected.
This suggests that the flaw(s) were caught during the testing stages. If true this means a purposeful decision to deceive both scientific and general communities at large. As a matter of course how often are known critical flaws left as is in "release" products, of whatever type.. And furthermore, if these allegation are proven correct, will this lead to further disinterest in the space program and by extension reduced budget for NASA..
Hey, NASA knew they were taking a risk loading the Mars Polar Lander with the Windows 2000 beta. They should have learned their lesson from the Navy's experience with NT. Somewhere on Mars, the MPL is sitting with a cracked LCD, through which is barely visible the fabled BSOD.
Windows is going the way of phlogiston...
2 Kilometers is not 10 miles, its less than 2 miles....
Fish
From most all I've ever read, heard, or seen about NASA is that these kinds of things are highly uncommon. I vaugly recall an error due to mis-conversion to metric.. but thats all I can think of.
:/
NASA really doesnt need this kind of publicity. This can only support the US governments continually stripping NASA of its funding. NASA is one of the few segments of our beaurocratic beast that I really appreciate (that and the USPS.)
Assuming this really did happen, the only explanation I can think of is funding. Perhaps it wasnt in the budget to fix the project?
D0f, this test shows that the retros wont fire.
Well we can't fix it, we spent the last nickle on the little USA flag sticker that goes on the side of the ship.
What are we going to do?
Well if it doesnt pass the test we could get fired !
So lets change the test!
good idea.
Reminds me of those dopes in lab science that used to always make up their numbers and then whine about how their results turned up faulty.
but I thought NASA weeded out those people
Perhaps the "undisclosed source" is someone that the cutting of NASA's budget would be in their best interest..
no
don't you guys know anything? aleister crowleys great grandson is the head of JPL. If that's not a clear indictment of evil intentions, I don't know what is. ;-)
These are never mentioned in the discussions of "What happenned to the lander". I was wondering why they were never mentioned, as they would distinguish between an incident early in the landing process (braking thrusters) from an incident late in the landing process (microswitches to detect successful landing).. A problem with the landing would not affect these early-released probes.
Nobody in the know really expected either of the penetrators to work," explains why nobody focusses on these as a diagnostic aid to analyze the main failure. This part of the quote explains a lot to me.
My note here is a reminder to people to read the "...more" after the first screenful of Tau Zero's note runs up against /.'s inline size limit.
How unlikely is this scenario? Probably not very likely, but who knows.
Okay, this may be radical, but could NASA have intentially designed the lander to fail? Lets say that their intent was to have an inexpensive failure to point to so that they could go to Congress and say "See what happens when we don't spend enough money? Good thing it wasn't a manned craft!"
Gonzo
I don't think the mission was "doomed to fail" like all these media sensationalists are trying to claim.
I believe the story I read said that lander hadn't gone through sufficient tests and there was a problem with the engine cut-off system. I think they just went ahead with it because of recent failure, and figured it would work, because of, as the previous post mentioned, all the hard work that had gone into it.
Were it, "doomed from launch" it'd be utterly stupid to launch the thing. But sometimes companies try and push stuff through to get it out on time, and then not have to worry about it. Game and software companies do it all the time. (Geez, I hope nobody notices the 65,000 bugs we have...) I don't think NASA is dumb, but I also don't think NASA is above those practices.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
Seriously, I don't really believe NASA deliberately launches projects that would not work simply because they have probably thousand of projects that would actually workk, why not spend time and money on those ones?
You can't handle the truth.
seriously, i remember NASA saying they knew there were a dozen or so serious flaws with MPL that were discovered "during the flight".
okay, it's too late to fix it, so we're covered, right?
that's some serious arrogance, folks. if the tests were falsified, as the report states, that should be "prison time" for someone. maybe some inmate will send a nice big probe to uranus.
NASA, you might want to start reviewing designs *before* the construction and launch of your probes. just an idea.
on the other hand, the MPL was supposed to be some kind of "industry validation" using low bidders and COTS technology. you sure saved the tax payers a lot of money! just think, we could have payed three times as much for a probe that worked! you still have two freebies to go using this logic!
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I retract my mindless characterization of Miles O'Brien. I should have simply said that there are any number of rumor-mongers out there who will publish anything. Does this fact compel real journalists like Oberg to publish rumor?
They are quoting quite a few unnamed sources here, I would be quite wary of sensational journalism here, as news companies like to have the breaking story, sometimes at the expense of proper fact.
-ShelbyCobra
Living life in the right side of the s-plane
It's still there, but they don't want people to know... If they had really lost it, there would have been much more of an investigation.
They leek stuff like this report, to give more creedance to the fact that its gone, when in fact it's probably giving the USA some super advantage in bio warfare or something.
Think about it, no wreakage? was there any explination? Nasa didn't seem so upset when it was "lost" so people were catching on, so they throw out that they knew, then people would think that, and they have.
I don't know if stab is part of their plan (fake being upset), or just a sucker.
There's two problems with the idea of building many identical probes and sending them all to Mars. First, accidents like those with the Polar Lander aren't independent. If one fails, it's highly likely that all of them will fail. What really needs to happen is that you build one, launch it, and if it doesn't work you modify it. And, in fact, that is what NASA's doing. All off the proposed Mars probes that are going to be built in the next 15 years are so are closely related. Second, unlike (say) Yugos, launch costs, support costs, and manufacturing costs are a big percentage of the total costs of the current generation of space probes. Consider that it probably cost about $35 million just to push the big red button on the launch vehicle that sent Polar Lander on it's way. That's 1/4 of the total budget. It probably costs on that same order to build the thing. Remember that it has to be constructed very painstakingly in a class 1000 cleanroom -- at least -- and then completely thermally tested and vibration tested, and then sanitized and kept sanitized all the way to Mars. Plus the costs of buying space-rated hardware is very high because there's no economy of scale for this stuff (and no, building more Mars probes isn't going to change that). Plus you have to pay all of the guys who guide the thing all the way through to the end of the mission. That millions of dollars more. The bottom line is that unlike most consumer items, the R&D costs of a space probe does not constitute the majority of the cost to perform a mission.
The Lab (what we here in Pasadena call JPL) faces consistent budget-cuts and downsizing. There are less than half the bodies there today than there were about 10 years ago. This creates a competitive atmosphere for gaining access to The Lab's most prized resource - money. What I have observed over there are different cadres of engineers. Occasionally, the leader of any given cadre must make a pitch to the Generals and other purse-holders at The Lab to get funded for a new project and keep their team working.
If I may speculate a bit...A possible explanation for this "advance knowledge" of the failure could be that the project leader knew of the failure, knew it could not be fixed reasonably within the budget, and buried it in order to buy him or herself some time to get funded/start on that next project. Mind you, this is simply speculation. It certainly would not be the first time a NASA Administrator signed off (knowingly or not) on something that was broken.
cat
I did not make any accusations of criminal activity. For that to be true, we would (hypothetically speaking, of course) have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. (or Ms.) Mid-level Mgmt. knew for a fact the thing would fail. Of course, it is obvious that the defensive argument for this is "we could not know until we tried". Reasonable doubt == Not guilty (so they tell me, anyway).
Quite simply, what I am suggesting, like you alluded to, is other factors may cloud or otherwise interfere with the judgment of NASA management at times. My suggested solution to the problem is to throw more money at them
Everyone thinks of space exploration when they think NASA. It is their primary mission, but along the way, they make a lot of other cool stuff. We all enjoy it, whether we know it or not. New battery technologies. Felt-tip pens (ok, maybe they could have used pencils like the Russians). Velcro. Tang (*laughs* I admit this is a stretch). Ask your local rocket scientist type, this list goes on and on.
cat
As I understand the articles on this, the problems didn't automatically doom the mission to failure, but they did dramatically increase the chance of it. Rather than announce that they had (allegedly) screwed up, they kept their fingers crossed, hoping it would still turn out ok, until it became obvious that something had gone wrong.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
The article says it was a decision by a suit to alter the tests to make it look like the parts would work. Sounds like the classic PHB problem to me. I guess even rocket scientests have to deal with that problem.
See what I just don't get about all this mars failures is how come noone's talking about Mr. Goldin's resignation. Where I come from if your team or company or whatever suffers this kinds of failures (despite some great successes) and generates such bad publicity with aftermath conspiracies (which I think this whole "they knew" BS is) you either quit or get fired.
maybe the problem is where I come from....
I don't mean to say that Goldin's a bad leader for NASA, but I'm not saying he's a great one either. Surely, NASA could use a facelift and get some '60s credibility back, and if I was Goldin i would seriously consider resigning in the best interests of NASA. but I'm not him...
I mean his whole strategy is based on the faster/cheaper/better phylosophy that seems to be the root of the problem...
or maybe I'm full of it...
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
NASA upper management is a slave to political priorities, which often conflict with the engineering realities that one must deal with to actually accomplish anything in the real world. This isn't going to change; it's the nature of the beast. If you want to go off planet, look elsewhere for your ride.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Before we come to all these (possibly premature) conclusions, (and "I believe this" or "I don't believe that,") type statements; let's wait until the actual report is released. If all this "leaked information" is, in fact, substantially true; then it is certainly unfortunate and regrettable. Suggesting that someone in NASA's mid-level management hierarchy [may have] made a "criminal" decision is a bit severe - especially when the report has not yet been released. As to speculation regarding whether or not high-level NASA managers would deliberately mislead (or deceive) people about a [known-in-advance] impending failure; I remember a comment made years ago by a young engineer who worked for a NASA contractor. He stated: "The higher up [in management] that engineers go, the more out-of-touch they get with [technical] reality." I would modify this (slightly) and say that high-level NASA managers understand a different kind of reality: The incessant budget-cutting drumbeat of elected politicians who control the funding spigot. Many politicians are very ambivalent (and in some cases downright hostile) to NASA. When you watch NASA budget hearings on CSPAN, at least one Congressman (or Senator) will point out that NASA's budget is in competition with other budget and spending priorities. What these politicians are really saying (to NASA brass) is: "My constituents want this money spent on THEM, and NOT on some piece of space junk out on Mars." So, whenever there is a costly failure such as this, it reinforces a conviction among these folks that "The money's being wasted, so why continue giving it to NASA?" It was different in NASA's glory days (the 1960's) when Congress and the President gave NASA a blank check. Those days are [probably] gone forever.
Silly thing called a budget, which is unfortunate. And in this wonderful society, there still happen to be people that don't quite see anything larger than the area in front of their face, so really, the middle management guy that tailored the testing to allow that engine error to happen wasn't likely to even be thinking about Mars. What Mars? I just need this engine to pass testing so I don't have to worry about it! And so we don't have to pay for an extensive redesign! But, you can't blame NASA for something like this I guess, having all "good" people in such a giant organization isn't very easy.
Uhh, that looks OK. We haven't seen that number yet.
Maybe they took a lesson from Bill Clinton?
It's great to see so much support for the project team from both inside and outside NASA/JPL. Thanks.
Yeah and you know what?????? Im happy to live in a country that doesnt waste its tax on such a thing :)
Um, no offence, but Miles O'Brien is hardly a "brainless twit". In fact, he is one of the best engineers Starfleet has ever had. Hrmph.
--
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
It's a sad but true fact in the aerospace industry that when under strong management pressure, engineers will sometimes fudge data to make it look like a UUT (unit under test) passes a test in order to make a tight schedule. Especially in an environment where the messenger of bad news is the one who gets punished. I would not be surprised if thrusters failed and some engineers and/or management hid the data, hoping it wouldn't get back to them.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
The probes seem like the easiest part to test, and therefore feel the most confident about their success. After the failure of the MPL, NASA was coming up with a lot of possible scenarios for the failure, most of which involved landing on a slope, canyon, etc. These explainations made the loss seem like the result of bad luck, which is obviously what NASA would prefer (bad luck looks better than incompetence). The failure of the probes indicate that the MPL probably didn't fail on touchdown, but failed at an earlier point which also resulted in the probes' failure.
Saying that everyone expected the probes to fail independantly of the MPL keeps alive the possibility that the MPL just suffered bad luck. Stating that the probes should have worked opens the door to having to explain a catastrophic failure due to a design flaw.
An interesting movie, the other 3/4 is about 3 other unrelated guys with their own passionate persuits.
NASA is controlled by an ancient secret society who ritualistically sacrifice their spacecraft to appease their Akkadian gods.
I woke up this morning, I was feeling kind of high, it was me, Jesus Christ and Haile Salassie I.
I wouldn't say stuff like that, or else the next Mars Lander will "accidently" crash into your house :(
As an embedded systems designer I find this hard to believe. All mechanical switches bounce. That is a different kind of bounce, however. I imagine this "spring bounce" could be just as easily detected and ignored through reprogramming the system in-flight, just as they twiddled with the Mars Explorer firmware. A simple "if close time
FIX YOUR GODDAMN PREVIEW ROB!! -- it's not like you haven't known about it for ages!
The last part of my post SHOULD have read:
A simple "if close time < 1s, ignore" statement is not hard to work into software.
This assumes, of course, that the 'leaked' information is invalid. It would seem that people always mistrust the official spokesman and instead go with the unidentified source. Figures - trust no one, literally (we'll trust the guy that doesn't exist!)...
First: you can very easily raise the temperature exposing the aft part of the probe to the sun for, say, 2 days before landing.
Second: If they knew about the microswitch issue, they could have REPROGRAMMED the software to ignore the switches at all for say 10 second after their initial release.
IF NASA KNEW OF THESE SUPPOSED PROBLEM, THEY WOULD HAVE FIXED THEM IN FEW MINUTES: they did far more complex things with the first lander.
So, MAYBE some contractor knew they screwed the thing and didn't tell NASA (and I don't know why, because as I said *this* kind of problems were fixable). But it's FAR MORE likely that this is only a case of stupid and harmful journalism.
Ciao,
Rob!
AniToolBox! An Open Source animation program!
Here's a link to a NASA press release replying to these allegations. Its a pretty thorough response to these issues. Seems like some conspiracy theorists going a little too far to me.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
Here's NASA's official press release.
Subject: NASA'S RESPONSE TO UPI'S MARCH 21 MARS POLAR LANDER STORY
Content-Type: text
Sender: owner-press-release@lists.hq.nasa.gov
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Peggy Wilhide
Headquarters, Washington, DC March 22, 2000
(Phone: 202/ 358-1898)
Brian Welch
Headquarters, Washington, DC
(Phone: 202/ 358-1600)
Don Savage
Headquarters, Washington, DC
(Phone: 202/ 358-1547)
RELEASE: 00-43
NASA'S RESPONSE TO UPI'S MARCH 21 MARS POLAR LANDER STORY
James Oberg of UPI claims that NASA knew there was a problem
with the Mars Polar Lander propulsion system prior to the Dec. 3
landing attempt and "withheld this conclusion from the public."
NASA categorically denies this charge. Here's what NASA did and
what NASA said:
* The Stephenson report, phase 1, was released to the public on
November 10, 1999 during a press conference at NASA Headquarters.
* The report made 11 different references to technical issues or
concerns involving the propulsion system and the Entry, Descent
and Landing (EDL) sequence.
* This issue was specifically addressed in the press conference
and in "MPL Observation No. 5" and other public recommendations of
the Stephenson Phase 1 report. It was entitled, "Cold Firing of
Thrusters," and dealt in detail with the catalyst bed issue cited
by Mr. Oberg of UPI in his March 21 story, "NASA Knew Mars Polar
Lander Doomed."
* Had UPI researched the public documents released on Nov. 10,
which have been available online at the NASA Home Page, the
reporter would have been able to conclude that NASA did indeed
publicly address propulsion issues, and specifically, the
propulsion system's "catalyst bed" temperature concern.
* Based on this review, NASA knew about the concerns with the
propulsion system, NASA took corrective action, and NASA hid
nothing from the public. We made our concerns known in early
November.
* Several failure scenarios have been reported in the press over
the last few weeks, including the lander legs microswitch issue.
Outlets such as the Denver Post, Space Daily, and National Public
Radio's "All Things Considered" have covered this angle. There is
nothing new in the UPI report relating to this specific issue.
The lander legs issue is among the failure modes we are studying.
* Both the Stephenson and Casani (John Casani, retired JPL
flight programs head and also director of mission assurance) teams
have conducted intensive reviews relating to Mars Polar Lander,
and their teams have surfaced no evidence relating to thruster
acceptance testing irregularities as alleged by UPI. In fact,
members of the review teams are using words like "bunk," "complete
nonsense," and "wacko," to describe their reactions to UPI's
charge.
- end -
* * *
NASA press releases and other information are available automatically
by sending an Internet electronic mail message to domo@hq.nasa.gov.
In the body of the message (not the subject line) users should type
the words "subscribe press-release" (no quotes). The system will
reply with a confirmation via E-mail of each subscription. A second
automatic message will include additional information on the service.
NASA releases also are available via CompuServe using the command
GO NASA. To unsubscribe from this mailing list, address an E-mail
message to domo@hq.nasa.gov, leave the subject blank, and type only
"unsubscribe press-release" (no quotes) in the body of the message.
For the record, I am not a boy. I'm a 33 year old MAN who is willing to put his name on his Slashdot account and post under it. I am, however, most definitely a geek. Rather proud of it, too, as it allows me to earn a better living than my father, who served in this country's military, and my brother who also serves, and of whom I am very proud and to whom I am most humbly grateful for his willingness to go in harm's way for me and the space program.
I take genuine offense at an admitted anonymous coward taking potshots at my patriotism because I point out that a weapons system the Air Force didn't even want costs more per unit than an entire space exploration mission.
I approve of the "anonymous coward" posting system because it allows people to express outright dangerous opinions, but when it is used to slander someone, then it truly lives up to the "coward" part of its name. You should be ashamed of yourself, sir or madam.
Sorry, bad day...
people are too fond of conspiracy theories and the likes... If they knew it wouldn't work they'd have fixed it...
The claim is that somebody (probably a contractor?) fudged the conditions of a test because he knew that his hardware would fail the "correct" test. NASA officials discovered the problem something like three days before landing -- kinda late to do the fixing.
This all looks eminently probable to me.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Now you have a rocket that passes the test. You believe that it will do it's job. It is here that I would disagree with the article - I cannot believe that anyone would, in effect, knowingly allow a defective rocket on the Mars PE., which is certainly what is seems to imply. I can see how culture and bureaucracy could conspire to allow it to happen unwittingly.
Great analysis, completely agree. Interactions between elements in NASA are more complex than average too; matrix management promotes a lot of dizzy focus and inability to spot who the hell is clearly responsible for what.
I have never in the past, and would not expect to in the future, work with a nicer, more commited bunch of people than the MPL crew. Such a sad ending, that took a while to get to grips with...
:)
The only minor upside was that we didnt actually have to work on 31/12/99, as we would have had to if the probe had landed
Your father was Rich Cook btw?
I must admit we had some issues with Lockheed Martin.
...
Could Boeing do a better job? Hope so
Anyway, we all know who screwed up the Climate Orbiter units conversion, and it wasn't JPL *coughlockheedcough*
I find it hard to believe that you completely missed one of the core elements of JPL's Culture. Maybe they put you off in a trailer somewhere, where you were unable to interact with a sufficient cross-section of the people there to grok this.
Simply because we were all working offsite at UCLA, at the new building constructed especially for the task (sharing with a tokomak too, which was cool), and this was where ops was being run from.
We got pretty much as far away from the JPL atmosphere as possible; almost everyone that worked at UCLA commented on what an excellent location it was for a mission; right in the middle of LA, with food, hotels, etc nearby; much more fun for people than being stuck in Pasadena in the middle of the mountains. Good for team morale anyway.
I hate the inconsistency of this. Far better to give NASA a fixed budget of sufficient funds to tackle all of their projects and let you folks handle how its spent. This is supposed to be about science, not political maneuvering to gain sufficient funds to complete projects - and then getting the funds too late to be of use.
:/ Most academics I know spend about half their time running around trying to get funding for their projects.
... all NASA achieves in gain terms is some abstract "enhancement of human knowledge" ... where's the profit?? Stupid, but true imho, similar to a university environment, same political bickering.
Welcome to Earth
It would seem to always be the case when there's no "clear" profit to be made
I still hold to my view that commercial space travel is the only way forward for serious space exploration. Slap a couple more Pizza Hut logos out there, and you'll have a lot more focus as serious commercial money hits the fan, and a lot more accountability takes place.
Of course, it wouldnt work for science missions, but it would be a nice complement to "solidify" what the science missions have already achieved.
They're not at that point yet, which is why we're seeing bouncing-airbag on one mission and parachute/rocket on the next (and no-parachute penetration probes).
NASA is made up of both civil servants (government
workers) and contractors.
The report doesn't make it clear who these "NASA
engineers" are. I suspect the civil servants monitor the work while the contractors perform the actual tests and evaluation.
It's kind of like ABC News when they report about "NASA technicians" working on the space shuttle at the Kennedy Space Center. Those persons are really the contractors.
It doesn't really excuse this. If the report is true this is criminal behavior IMO. But I'd like to clarify who the people were.
Generalizing about "nasty old contractors" and "dedicated and hard-working" scientists is faulty at best.
There are plenty of "dedicated and hard-working" contractors that work "above and beyond" in all phases of a mission. Some of these jobs can result in serious injury or death if not done properly every single time. This is something mission scientists and managers usually watch from a far away video monitor.
I do agree that scientists involved with construction is a good idea, but sometimes it is so the contractor can read the scientist the Riot Act as well. A space mission is group cooperation on a grand scale.
It seems that the only way for the space program to get positive attention these days is have an extremely risky mission that works. Well thought out, pragmatic and "Occam's Rasor" type missions that work are usually too "boring", and risky missions that fail lead to the public questioning all types of space exploration (not to mention lots of Monday-morning quarterbacking).
Talk about a difficult order to fill!
NASA knew Mars Polar Lander doomed
United Press International - March 21, 2000 15:01
By James Oberg, UPI Space Writer
HOUSTON, March 21 (UPI) -- The disappearance of NASA's Mars Polar Lander last December was no surprise to space officials, UPI has learned.
Prior to its arrival at Mars, a review board had already identified a fatal design flaw with the braking thrusters that doomed the mission, but NASA withheld this conclusion from the public.
The probe was lost while attempting to land near the martian south pole on December 3. Two small microprobes which had deployed separately also were never heard from again. It was the second expensive setback for American interplanetary exploration in less than three months. On September 23, a companion probe had been destroyed when a navigation error sent it skimming too deeply into the atmosphere of Mars.
Following these failures, NASA commissioned several expert panels to review the accidents and recommend improvements in NASA procedures. A source close to the panel probing the second accident has told UPI that its conclusions are "devastating" to NASA's reputation. Unlike the previous accident, where management errors merely prevented the recognition of other human errors, in this case it was a management misjudgment which caused the fatal flaw in the first place.
"I'm as certain as I can be that the thing blew up," the source concluded.
As explained privately to UPI, the Mars Polar Lander vehicle's braking thrusters had failed acceptance testing during its construction. But rather than begin an expensive and time-consuming redesign, an unnamed space official simply altered the conditions of the testing until the engine passed.
"That happened in middle management," the source told UPI. "It was done unilaterally with no approval up or down the chain of command."
The Mars Polar Lander employed a bank of rocket engines which use hydrazine fuel. The fuel is passed through metal grates which cause it to decompose violently, creating the thrust used by the engines. These metal grates are called "catalyst beds," or "cat beds." Their purpose is to initiate the explosive chemical reaction in the hydrazine.
"They tested the cat bed ignition process at a temperature much higher than it would be in flight," UPI's source said. This was done because when the cat beds were first tested at the low temperatures predicted after the long cruise from Earth to Mars, the ignition failed or was too unstable to be controlled.
So the test conditions were changed in order to certify the engine performance. But the conditions then no longer represented those most likely to occur on the real space flight.
Following the September loss of the first spacecraft due to management errors, NASA had initiated a crash review of the Mars Polar Lander to identify any similar oversights. According to UPI's source, the flaws in the cat bed testing were uncovered only a few days before the landing was to occur on December 3.
By then it was too late to do anything about it.
Garbled rumors of some temperature-related design flaw circulated in the days before the landing attempt. However, as in the September case when space officials possessed terrifying indications of imminent failure even before the arrival at Mars, NASA made no public disclosure of these expectations.
The Mars Polar Lander investigation team has also reportedly identified a second fatal design flaw that would have doomed the probe even if the engines had functioned properly.
The three landing legs of the probe contain small microswitches which are triggered when the legs touch the surface. This signal commands the engines to cease firing.
Post-accident tests have shown that when the legs are initially unfolded during the final descent, springs push them so hard that they "bounce" and trigger the microswitches by accident. As a result, the computer receives what it believes are indications of a successful touchdown, and it shuts off the engines.
Since this false signal actually occurs high in the air, the engine shutdown automatically leads to a free fall and destructive high-speed impact.
Ground testing prior to launch apparently never detected this because each of the tests was performed in isolation from other tests. One team verified that the legs unfolded properly.
Another team verified that the microswitches functioned on landing.
No integrated end-to-end test was performed due to budget and time constraints. But UPI has been privately told that "this has been reproduceable on a regular basis" in post-flight tests.
Perhaps by coincidence, in a safety memo to NASA employees distributed on March 20, NASA administrator Dan Goldin stressed "the importance of adequate testing." Reliability, he said, "requires well-thought-out verification and test activities."
Goldin explicitly described the adverse impact of "our difficulties with recent failures in late stages of development -- such as system integration and testing -- and during mission operations." The memo did not specifically attribute these problems to the Mars failures.
The Mars Polar Lander also deployed two small "penetrator" probes, both called Deep Space 2. They were designed to fall freely through the thin atmosphere, hit the ground at about 200 meters per second (400 miles per hour), and come to rest deep in the soil.
All attempts to pick up radio signals from these probes, relayed via another spacecraft already orbiting Mars, also failed. Reportedly, the review board believes that the probe radio equipment could not have survived the impact.
Alternately, the probes may simply have hit ground too rocky for survival. Engineers also suspected that their batteries, which had been charged before launch almost a year earlier and not checked since then, might not have retained sufficient power.
"Nobody in the know really expected either of the penetrators to work," UPI's primary source said.
Dr. Carl Pilcher, head of NASA's planetary program, talked with space scientists at last week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston. While expressing disappointment at the setbacks and skepticism of ambitious flight schedules -- "Our ambition exceeded our grasp," he told the scientists -- he would not discuss the results of the accident investigation.
The conclusions, he did admit, "make sober reading." The investigation was led by Tom Young, a former manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory which runs most of NASA's deep space probes.
"Goldin recently told his managers that the Young report will be the Rogers Commission of space science," Andrew Lawler wrote in the March 10 issue of Science magazine, "referring to the devastating critique delivered by a panel that examined the 1986 Challenger disaster."
And in a March 9 internal memo from JPL director Ed Stone, which UPI has obtained, space workers are warned that "the days ahead may at times be difficult."
According to Lori Garver, NASA's associate administrator for plans, the report on NSA's failures will be reviewed internally and then will be sent to the White House before being released to the public.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
From my reading of the reports, and assuming they are reasonably credible, this is one of those things that keeps coming up in Government R&D and procurement and we keep trying to fight - the "success is mandatory" syndrome. People here and there - and not rarely, unfortunately - are convinced that it is better to find a way to deem something conforming than to find out what is wrong and fix it.
We (the US Govt as a whole) are gradually doing better at fixing that syndrome in general when it comes to our own management practices (i.e. the conviction that our practices must be good and that we shouldn't find flaws in them) but still doing badly at this one extremely important practice. Why?
- Everyone is afraid Congress, the press and the public will think we're doing bad jobs. We are supposedly (and sometimes in fact) working closely with the contractors to improve the chance of conforming goods being delivered, so if they fail, it's our fault. That's a simplistic but very likely reaction in the current environment of Government procurement.
- Whenever something fails and it seems to be the fault of an agency, the logical response would be to find out why it failed and dedicate resources to fixing the problem. But the much more probable result is to cut funds to the agency as a penalty, and thus guarantee that it will never be fixed. This is a pervasive and IMO important issue.
- It is sometimes hard to identify a contractor as not complying with requirements without accusing them of fraud, if (for instance) they say the item passed tests and your review indicates that it couldn't possibly have, so they either are lying to you about it passing or about even doing the tests. These days, by and large no one wants to call a contractor a crook unless it is absolutely clear and provable and also politically acceptable. Again, the thought is that we are supposed to be working closely with the contractors, so such problems should never arise without our advance knowledge. This is absurd, of course, but it is in fact likely that senior officials or congress members will react this way. This is a very bad environment for buying extremely expensive items or ones that involve human safety.
- There is rarely really good understanding of technical problems by the people who have to make decisions about them. This is partly the fault of badly conceived organizations, and partly bad communications on the part of the managers and the technical experts. It is too easy for managers to believe that something is "good enough" and that the technical people who disagree are just too narrowly focused on perfecting their own pet projects. (Because of bad organizations, it is also sometimes the case that the managers never even hear from the technical expert who was willing and able to explain the concerns.)
I see this last one all the time. I have been involved in numerous contract disputes where NO ONE who was actually making decisions on behalf of the government had looked closely at the specification or drawings to see if they made sense, could be followed, and required the contractor to do what the technical "experts" said was required of the item. That is, there is someone telling the procurement person "this item must do such-and-such"; the procurement person tells the contractor "it must do such-and-such"; the contractor says "the specifications don't require that"; the procurement person, who has no training in reading engineering drawing and probably doesn't even understand what the item is for, asks his "expert" to confirm that the item really is required to do such-and-such; and he never realizes that the technical expert doesn't even know for sure what drawings were really provided to the contractor, and is only talking about what such a device is supposed to do in theory.And it's not going to get better without pain. Most big buying agencies (such as DoD and I believe NASA) have been reduced consistently for years; DoD has been reduced in personnel every year for the past 14. What does this mean?
- the bright young people with up-to-date skills are forced out by seniority rules;
- the ones who have lots of experience, know what matters and have the seniority and respect that they aren't afraid to identify problems retire; and at the same time,
- many of the best of the middle group jump ship early because they are afraid of later reductions and can afford to take the risk because they can get good salaries elsewhere.
So we are left with a few really dedicated people who don't want to give up, but also with a lot of people who will never quit because they couldn't compete on the commercial market.Solutions, anyone?
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Wed, 22 Mar 2000 09:40:11
sci.space.policy Thread 15 of 22
Lines 8
Re: MPL lies
RespNo 4 of 4
JamesOberg at AOL http://www.aol.com
Newsgroups: sci.space.policy
The nov 10 press conference said that cold starts could result in 'delayed ignition'. Igniting a cold engine is a formula for thermal shock. My information is that the "fix" of turning on heaters in the fuel tanks was not really going to heat the cat beds to any significant degree. Engineers gave the probe a zero chance of success -- maybe they knew the managers just didn't want to know that.
Seastead this.
It should be quite entertaining to check out the audio archive of this the March 22 broadcast of the Art Bell show! ;-)
James Oberg is generally reliable so it is rather strange he would blow off so much of his bread-and-butter credibility as a major wire service's science reporter.
Seastead this.
They need a big sign like the road construction crews have, saying "$180 million of your tax dollars at work."
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
our going to have to take risks when going to new levels. NASA and members of its staff, made decisions, based on all the information they had at the time. They took an educated risk, that's all. We take educated risks every day, at work, at home in our personal lives. How many folks can honestly say that EVERY time they have ever pulled their car into a busy highway they made the right choice to go at that perticular moment. I think it's safe to say most of us have made a few poor choices. Hell it's NASA, these guys are in the risk business, every mission they run has an element of risk, they make decisions with elements of risk, some risk very high, on every manned or unmanned mission they do. Give 'em a break. I'm not happy to have our tax dollars burned up either but I'd rather have that than not to have tried at all.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
But, he does seem to take perverse pleasure in the failures that occur. Like me, he may simply wish that the shoddiness which occasionally creeps in would go away. But the fact that I rarely see a word of credit for the things NASA has done well makes it seem that he has an animus.
My questions: What does Oberg accomplish by releasing this news/rumor, given that the failure reports will be out in a couple of weeks? Did he have a choice, or would the anonymous source have blabbed to a brainless twit like Miles O'Brien to ensure the story got out? What does the anonymous source get out of this?
Nasa chief Dan Goldin recently told his managers that the MPL report will be "the Rogers Commission of space science", referring to the devastating critique delivered by a panel that examined the 1986 Challenger disaster.
My impression of the Rogers Commission (gleaned from Richard Feynman's autobiographical stories) was that it was a whitewash that failed and ultimately was a truthful and accurate assessment of management problems of some, but not all, parts of the SST program. Is this what Dan Goldin means?
As far as NASA's credibility goes, I just don't know. While I believe that they may have known the ways that the craft was likely to fail, that does not constitute knowledge that it would fail. Furthermore, if this was known only three days before the final landing, it really was too late to do anything about it.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
Sure they know there was a risk, I'm sure... but that's like goin out yelling TOYOTA KNEW THIS ACCIDENT WOULD HAPPEN!&#@$#! when there's a car accident.
Pretty much pointless.
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
Quoting from his article "And in a March 9 internal memo from JPL director Ed Stone, which UPI has obtained, space workers are warned that "the days ahead may at times be difficult."
As first reported on NASA Watch On November 8th NASA did indeed know that there could be a problem with the thrusters. Here is an excerpt of the press release; "The NASA investigation board, chaired by Art Stephenson, director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., found that cold temperatures could affect the performance Mars Polar Lander's descent engine, which begins firing at about 2 kilometers (about 10 miles) altitude during the descent to Mars surface. As a result of the finding, a team of engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has developed procedures to warm up the engine system prior to firing. In addition, the team has analyzed descent engine performance at a range of temperatures to assess its predicted performance upon arrival."
The report on the Mars Polar Lander to be relased shortly will no doubt tarnish NASA's reputation in the short term. The repercussions of the last two failed Mars missions could set back the exploration of the solar system 5-10 years. While perhaps it is time for some serious reorganization at NASA we must not let these setbacks stop us. NASA's budget is small and has been shrinking for some time. If the U.S. is to lead the world in space exploration then a stronger committment is required by government.
Marc Boucher
SpaceRef - Your Space Reference
Everyone knows that human beings came from aliens, yet NASA repeatedly covers up alien contact it has had with the Zoltar species from quadrant Delta that has given us such great 'NASA' technological advances as the TV dinner, freeze-dried chili, and velcro. No self-thinking human being could ever have come up with these astounding inventions, and NASA should just give up the "We don't know any aliens, honest!" argument.
We didn't land on the friggin' moon! Hello? Have you seen the so called 'pictures' of the moon? They have black crosses all over them. I don't know about you, but when I look up at the moon, I don't see any black crosses. I see green cheese, and hell, the so-called 'moon rocks' they brought back had absolutely no cheese in them whatsoever. It doesn't surprise me that geologists analyzing the rocks concluded that they were 'just like earth rocks.' What else are earth rocks going to be like?
I believe the quote heard around NASA headquarters was, "Oops, how'd we let that one slip through?" Of course, there's a face on Mars. The Zoltar species put it there as a way of reminding NASA, "Hey, we're watching you." They did an awful job trying to cover it up with the MGS pictures (I could do that in Photoshop, I mean, come on!), but luckily, Hollywood called them on it in the non-fiction Oscar-caliber classic, Mission to Mars. As always, though, NASA has to send out their Slashdot goons to bad-mouth the movie and talk about what trash it is.
Why are we landing on some pitiful asteroid in the middle of a million billion pitiful asteroids? We're setting up a super-secret base from which we can defend ourselves from the Zoltar species, duh! Would you look for humans on that pitiful rock? I wouldn't, and neither will the ZOltar. NASA, obviously ungrateful for velcro has decided to strike back against the oppressors. They're not telling you or I, though, because we probably won't make it.
Is anyone listening to me? Anyone? Hello? Did I mention they knew about Mars Polar Lander's imminent failure before it was even launched, yet covered it up by throwing hundreds of millions dollars and man hours at it? It's obvious. NASA has a history of being sneaky with the public and it has to stop. I'm going to start a petition on a site and I encourage every Slashdot person to sign the petition and then maybe NASA will stop.
NOTE: This post not for the humor (or humour) impaired
NOTE 2: Are we landing on Eros or some other asteroid? If it's not Eros, then it's a further NASA cover-up because they're brainwashing people one-by-one into thinking that it's Eros we're landing on, probably to fool the Zoltar when they capture us and digest our brains.
As the evilpenguin points out, the cost of the project was five percent of the construction costs of a B-2 bomber. Lessons have been learned. Public awareness has been raised. Imaginations of young childern have been sparked by the possibility.
Next time, for maybe a slightly higher cost (seven percent of a B-2), we will land on Mars. I'm sure I'm not the only one who considers this feat a more worthwhile goal than radar absorbing paint.
I mean, for God's sake, it would cost less money to put people on Mars than Titanic made in the theaters. Doesn't this bother anyone else? NASA needs a public support fund.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Quote:
... for like 4 years we had so little funding, and the manager (Karen McBride) did an incredible job to secure the operations facility at UCLA, which was a first for a NASA operation to be run outside JPL.
... billions of dollars spent, ten years of development, but they delivered an absolutely monumental amount of science back for years. Even if the MPL had been a huge success, it would still only have had three months of science, and that too not 24 hours a day! Instruments like the microphone only had about one hour a day or something stupid in which to transmit data back to earth.
The biggest problem is of course the budget for NASA, which has been steadily decreasing over the last few years. I think it is ludicrous of us to expect NASA to launch missions like these without a proper budget for development, manufacturing, and testing of the equipment. In this case, apparently the money was simply not there to afford a complete test of the whole landing proceedure - which would have made it obvious that the engines were not going to work and that the censors for shutting them off would not work either
Too right. It was really really stupid on the Mars Polar Lander mission
Then, of course, landing comes closer, and we are glutted with money from NASA. But what's the point? We get 10 sysadmins one month before landing, and we have to spend hours training them up; much more preferable to have had one good one ten months before!
Compare this to the old days of Viking
Still, I have faith in Faster Better Cheaper; we cant afford mistakes like the Mars Orbiter again, where a simple case of bad luck (exploding fuel line) lost the entire mission. Painful as it was to lose the MPL/MCO/DS2 probes, they were cheap and cheerful, and we can throw more of them out to Mars.
This is almost invariably catastrophic - contractors have different agendas from scientists, and once the contract is secured, they often don't want to do more than the absolute minimum necessary to fulfil it.
If you replace "scientists" with "government customers" in general, then I'd have to say that this is true, again, in the general case. I myself am a contractor, and while I put in a lot of long hours and have occasionally been whacked by my supervisors for giving the customer "too much," I have known contractors who look forward to delivering a buggy-as-hell product.
They know that the government will turn around and say, "Well, gosh, that sucked, but we know you can do better if we give you more money and let you try again." (In this respect, they're no different from any big computer vendor (Microsoft, Sun, RedHat) and their customers -- the vendor can ship crap and the customers will keep paying for it.)
Having said that, no, I don't believe that NASA knew about it in advance either. They have too much to lose by doing so, and not enough to gain. I have no problem believing that some of their contractors tried, however.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
You're supposed to test to the conditions you expect. The whole point of the BBC article is that the conditions of the test were changed to be very different from the conditions under which the braking rockets had to ignite, because the motors consistently failed the tests which simulated the expected conditions. Sending a probe that fails because of some un-foreseen condition is science; sending a probe that fails because of something you knew about before you built it is wasteful.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
From: NASANews@hq.nasa.gov
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: NASA'S RESPONSE TO UPI'S MARCH 21 MARS POLAR LANDER STORY
Peggy Wilhide
Headquarters, Washington, DC March 22, 2000
(Phone: 202/ 358-1898)
Brian Welch
Headquarters, Washington, DC
(Phone: 202/ 358-1600)
Don Savage
Headquarters, Washington, DC
(Phone: 202/ 358-1547)
RELEASE: 00-43
NASA'S RESPONSE TO UPI'S MARCH 21 MARS POLAR LANDER STORY
James Oberg of UPI claims that NASA knew there was a problem with the Mars Polar Lander propulsion system prior to the Dec. 3 landing attempt and "withheld this conclusion from the public." NASA categorically denies this charge. Here's what NASA did and what NASA said:
* The Stephenson report, phase 1, was released to the public on November 10, 1999 during a press conference at NASA Headquarters.
* The report made 11 different references to technical issues or concerns involving the propulsion system and the Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) sequence.
* This issue was specifically addressed in the press conference and in "MPL Observation No. 5" and other public recommendations of the Stephenson Phase 1 report. It was entitled, "Cold Firing of Thrusters," and dealt in detail with the catalyst bed issue cited by Mr. Oberg of UPI in his March 21 story, "NASA Knew Mars Polar Lander Doomed."
* Had UPI researched the public documents released on Nov. 10, which have been available online at the NASA Home Page, the reporter would have been able to conclude that NASA did indeed publicly address propulsion issues, and specifically, the propulsion system's "catalyst bed" temperature concern.
* Based on this review, NASA knew about the concerns with the propulsion system, NASA took corrective action, and NASA hid nothing from the public. We made our concerns known in early November.
* Several failure scenarios have been reported in the press over the last few weeks, including the lander legs microswitch issue. Outlets such as the Denver Post, Space Daily, and National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" have covered this angle. There is nothing new in the UPI report relating to this specific issue. The lander legs issue is among the failure modes we are studying.
* Both the Stephenson and Casani (John Casani, retired JPL flight programs head and also director of mission assurance) teams have conducted intensive reviews relating to Mars Polar Lander, and their teams have surfaced no evidence relating to thruster acceptance testing irregularities as alleged by UPI. In fact, members of the review teams are using words like "bunk," "complete nonsense," and "wacko," to describe their reactions to UPI's charge.
- end -
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
As always with anything to do with Space, if you want the latest information on this issue, be sure to check Spaceref.com and NASA Watch. In this matter, I believe NASA Watch was reporting a possible engine problem back in November - although there was no corroborating evidence at the time. The fact that they knew about the problems with the MPL was reported yesterday.
Certainly, some heads are going to roll in NASA, and hopefully the blame gets placed where it should be - on the shoulders of whoever decided to cover this up. Also, blame should apparently be placed on the folks at Lockheed Martin (the company that I believe built the engines on the MPL) who must have known there was a problem with their engines.
The biggest problem is of course the budget for NASA, which has been steadily decreasing over the last few years. I think it is ludicrous of us to expect NASA to launch missions like these without a proper budget for development, manufacturing, and testing of the equipment. In this case, apparently the money was simply not there to afford a complete test of the whole landing proceedure - which would have made it obvious that the engines were not going to work and that the censors for shutting them off would not work either.
OTOH, it is also criminal for a project of this magnitude and expense to go ahead with a known flaw that will prevent its success, and those responsible should be called to the mat for their explanations.
Sadly, this will probably put space exploration back several years, and the blame will probably end up on the shoulders of good people who didn't deserve it.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I've been in and near NASA too, and I have to say I don't agree with your assessment. Not to say the JPL team wasn't dedicated and hard-working, but what seems to be described here is a contractor problem, not a science team problem.
There is plenty of precedent for this kind of thing. The original Hubble mirror was fucked up by Perkin Elmer, which then proceeded to shade the results of the optical tests - a fact that was not discovered until after Hubble was launched, leading to the NASA-spun "triumph" of the first repair mission.
There was a projact management failure in that case: the contractor was not properly supervised by the project scientists. It sounds like this is also what happened with MPL.
This is almost invariably catastrophic - contractors have different agendas from scientists, and once the contract is secured, they often don't want to do more than the absolute minimum necessary to fulfil it. Successful projects send scientists out to live at the contractor plant, and to read them the Riot Act on a bi-weekly basis.
GNU Info is documentation optimized for machine readability
Mars Exploration Program.
Jainith Slashdot 4 Life
My feelings exactly. My father was Project Manager for the MPL mission. He poured heart and soul into it, commuted from LA to Denver to keep the engineering on track, and then from LA to Florida to keep the launch on track. He did an incredible job with the money and mass that was allocated, and was never content to slack off and let things take care of themselves.
From what I saw of his colleagues at the launch, the entire project operated this way. This was an incredible group of engineers and scientists who would never fiddle with the test conditions to make things "pass their tests."
I can easily believe it. If you work in a success driven culture that is also under financial pressure - which describes NASA pretty well - then as a manager you'd tend to view things optimistically, because if things fail then you are seen to fail too. The chain of thought of whoever is alleged to be responsible is frighteningly plausible.
First you test the rocket motor - it fails. This is bad. You have two choices: redesign the rocket motor or redesign the test. The second is quicker and cheaper. So, you have a close look at the test, and pick holes in it. You are now the devils's advocate, and it is terribly easy to find "flaws" in a test that render it "not representative" - destructive criticism is easy. So you redesign the test because you've found all these flaws in it.
Repeat until the rocket passes.
Now you have a rocket that passes the test. You believe that it will do it's job. It is here that I would disagree with the article - I cannot believe that anyone would, in effect, knowingly allow a defective rocket on the Mars PE., which is certainly what is seems to imply. I can see how culture and bureaucracy could conspire to allow it to happen unwittingly.
First off, let me say I read stab's excellent post ("I worked there, and I find it Hard to Believe") and I completely agree with what he says there. I, too, find it difficult to believe this story. But I am interested in why such a story is given credence enough to be published.
I think NASA has a serious credibility problem that stems in no small part from the mid-1980's Challenger accident. We have seen NASA attempt to pass off bad decision making (the Challenger launch was opposed by every Thiokol engineer on the SRB team) as a technical judgement call too complex to hold them accoutable for. Dr. Feynman's now famous ice water experiment at the hearings took the air out of that effort.
Any of us who were around for that (pointless aside: one of the most baffling things about getting older is how shocking we find it that anyone could be too young to remember things we remember -- nothing is more surprising than aging) can remember the image of NASA management as a bunch of toadying bureaucrats posing as engineers to avoid responsibility for a colossal tragedy.
I think this is why a story like this one, which is little more than rumormongering, gets disproportionate attention.
I, for one, supported the hardworking scientists and engineers involved in the Space Program even as NASA leadership struggled to hide bad decisions made for political expedience as complex technical problems boldly handled by courageous decision-makers who had to let the chips fall in the face of their petty and waffling engineers (can you tell NASA infuriated me during the Challenger hearings?). JPL has done magnificent work, and I think even the worst NASA managers were just trying to avoid the destruction of their careers, an understandable if self-serving goal. I'm sure each of them is haunted each day by the image of those trails of smouldering debris trailing out of the sky.
The business of exploration and discovery is fraught with risk. Sometimes things fail. Whether that failure is human or mechanical the aftermath should be the struggle to understand the nature of the failure, not to find someone on whom to hang the blame.
As much as I think NASA needed to be raked over the Challenger accident, it was becuase it was an avoidable tragedy. NASA needed to be changed such that if the same circumstances arose, the right decision will be made next time.
I remember seeing an interview with Roger Beaujolais, a senior engineer at Morton-Thiokol at the time of the Challenger accident. In that interview he talked about watching the launch after he and all the other engineers had advised against the launch. He said, after the shuttle cleared the tower, "We just dodged a bullet." A moment later the spacecraft disintegrated in a collosal fireball and seven people lost thier lives, including Chirstine Macauliff (sp?), the much touted "Teacher in Space." Roger Beaujolais lives with that moment every day of his life. So do all the men and women of NASA.
I do not believe this story about the lander in no small part because in my heart and soul I pray that human memory is not that short. That no one in the NASA that remained after the Challenger accident would ever, could ever hide a failure, even one that involved no loss of life.
And for those who think $150 million is some sort of monumental waste, how much does one B1 bomber cost? A lot more than the entire Mars Polar Lander project...
To introduce myself, I worked on the Mars Polar Lander project as their Outreach Architect, and did some work with the Ground Data Systems crew.
That report is bull as far as I am concerned. We worked our ARSES off as launch came closer. I have never worked with a brighter, more intelligent, and more optimistic crew than the Mars Polar Lander team that was assembled at MVACS before that fateful landing.
After the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost, we had a huge influx of support from JPL; system admins, scientists, programmers, all drafted in at short notice simply to come in and fill in the budget shortage that we'd been suffering from before.
I somehow don't believe JPL would have thrown everything they had at us, to help us out, if they somehow knew this "secret" that the lander was doomed to fail.
It is possible that such a report could have kept secret by uppermost echelons of NASA, and kept from the team and the JPL management. I find that difficult to believe; I would count any such action as bordering criminal, after the incredible amount of hard work sunk by the staff of the mission before landing.
Really, the feeling of utter disbelief we had when it crashed said it all. Noone really expected it to happen, after all the effort, and it took a long time for some of the crew to come to terms with it.
Also, the Mars missions are underwent a fundamental and deep review of their future after this mission failed; it simply wasn't in NASA's interests to cover this up, since it really would have been a "worstcase" end to their Mars Surveyor 98 missions, with only ONE success (the global surveyor). If they did know about this, it would have made sense for them to come out and say it, and attempt a fix, rather than keep it secret, and throw (useless) resources at the team!
As with all other management, NASA executives can be dumb, but I don't believe they could be that dumb.
I worked at NASA/GSFC for four years. Admittedly, it's about as far (geographically) as you can get from JPL and still be in the U.S. -- but I can't imagine a full coverup by NASA of any sort of major secret. The climate of the organization is just too open for that. Of course, there *are* plenty of PHB's (as in any other large organization) and it's at least possible that some engineer, somewhere, believed that the thrusters wouldn't work. But as for a coverup at high levels? Naah.
On the other hand, LOTS of outsiders seem to think that NASA coverups are a good explanation for everything from dropped telemetry in solar images to the mysterious sounds they hear (in Wisconsin) at four in the morning. Comes with being a high profile organization, I guess.
FWIW, here's the NASA response -- it's a press release that came out this morning.
(Gee, it'd sure be nice if we could use <pre> in our HTML -- these things come out in ASCII...)
NASA'S RESPONSE TO UPI'S MARCH 21 MARS POLAR LANDER STORY
James Oberg of UPI claims that NASA knew there was a problem with the Mars Polar Lander propulsion system prior to the Dec. 3 landing attempt and "withheld this conclusion from the public." NASA categorically denies this charge. Here's what NASA did and what NASA said:
- end -
Doesn't people get it?
We are at war with Mars, the mars polar lander was not a probe it was a nuclear bomb. We have been at war with the martians since the 70's.
Hello? Cant you guys/girls see the obvious?