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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.
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.
NOTE 3: if you have to tell people your post was meant to be funny, you didn't do a good enough job.
No, the problem is that half of Slashdot's readers can't tell the difference between a humorous post and a delusional post. I've had posts mocking something get moderated down two points because people take it seriously and get in a complete huffy, even when it's obviously sarcastic. One time, I posted a reply saying it was just good humor, and then it got moderated up. The majority of people in this world can't tell sarcasm and tone of voice from plain text.
And humor's subjective. We had a good laugh at the studio today based off these comments (and some others that didn't make it).
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).
You think humanity will last for a billion years or more? I'm a fairly optimistic person, but I'd guess not, at least not in our present state. "The end of sunlight" will not be for a few billion years, but long before that our sun will bake us anyway (when it heads to red giant stage)... We'll have destroyed ourselves long before that ever becomes a problem. We've only been around a paltry few thousand years, and we're already, at any given moment, less than an hour from worldwide destruction of life. Another thousand years, and someone's finger will slip.
The money going into NASA and other programs is more useful than a lot of people realize. Technical advancements need to be pushed somehow. War is great for this, and exploration / outer space travel pushes this along also. Mnay good technologies come out of these things, which end up making much of our lives more convenient and, believe or not, cheaper on a day-to-day basis. Plus a great portion of this money goes to the workers (high costs are due to large amounts of person-years). These are people with familys. They need jobs. They support their local economies with their food/housing/etc dollars. Their children go to schools. It's a part of the society, and not a detrimental one. Many things have gained from the work that goes into these projects. Even the garbage trucks that pick up your trash have benefited from the space program. If all you are considering is 'millions of dollars to try to look at some microbes in rocks', then you are taking a very short-sighted view of things.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
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.
--
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?
--
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
I appreciate your point. The problem is that it is hard to measure the benefits to society of any spending program. I think it is safe to say that the space program has benefited society greatly in material ways (miniturization, computers, physics), but also in cultural and personal ways (we landed on the moon).
We should also keep the costs involved in perspective. The Mars Polar Lander cost (these figures are from memory and may be off) about $165 million. F-22 fighter jets cost about $200 million each and the Pentagon recently ordered 300 of them. Each Space Shuttle mission costs ~$800 million.
Some other budget outlays for 1996 (from the New York Times Almanac):
National Defence: $265,748,000,000 (yep, 265 Billion)
Interest on Debt: $241,090,000,000
Aid to Families with Dependent Children (Welfare): 20,295,000,000
Space Research and Technology (1994): 13,533,000,000
Total budget (1996): 1,560,330,000,000
The United States is incredibly wealthy. I agree that the quality of life of its citizens should have a priority in the budget, but NASA isn't where I'd take the money from.
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 -
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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:
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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?