Stealth Asteroid Misses Earth

Paradoxish writes: "Gah. According to cnn.com an asteroid hiding in an astronomical blindspot nearly blindsided Earth. The scary part is that scientists didn't notice it until four days AFTER it passed by. Apparently, it would've been similiar to the Tunguska explosion. Scary." As long as they keep missing Earth, we're OK.

Comments

Software glitch

[Jack Wagner]

This is simply not true. I happen to know, having done some consulting work for NASA that they are using a proprietary planet tracking system that runs on openBSD which is reporting false positives.

I don't want to get too technical here but basically the openBSD kernel doesn't use any real-time scheduling techniques and instead relies on an O(log(N)) algorithm which causes all double precicsion calculations to be off by +/-.0005. A smal number to be sure but when you are talking about large planets that are billions of miles away it make a huge difference.

For the record I resigned my post after they refused to address my concerns with using a substandard operating system to deal with these important matters.

Yours,
-Jack