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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.
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.
--
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:
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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?