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Software Bug Causes Soyuz To Land Way Off
howhardcanitbetocrea writes "A mysterious software fault in the new guidance computer of the Soyuz TMA-1 spacecraft was the cause of the high-anxiety off-course landing over the weekend, according to NASA sources.' Which is why I will never trust the Strategic Defence Initiative - the star wars project. It only takes one line of mistyped code in what will always be a beta release."
ahhh... it's just too obvious!
Software faults are not mysterious -- people are ignorant.
-kgj
Microsoft announced that a patch to "Windows XP for Spacecraft" will be available on Wednesday.
My journal has hot
Or any software. You might want to consider the software all the weapons systems that actually exist first, or anything in a safety-related environment. Take a look at Risks Digest.
It only takes one line of mistyped code in what will always be a beta release.
That's right. Better to have never tried at all than to try and fail, I always say.
This sounds similar to the crash landing one of the mars spacecraft had when the operators forgot to convert English units to metric units.
You'd think that in such operations, where you only ever get one chance, they would have the most error free systems possible. I'm surprised they didn't feed the computer simulated data and found where it would take them.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
Now we have frikken astronauts beating up on poor anonymous software developpers... quoth the article
Yeah... right... if I had a nickle for every time I heard an end user say something similar to that ("I swear I didn't touch anything... it just... crashed..." or "The files just... disappeared! Gone! Disappeared! I didn't do anything!") I'd have...well...a lot of nickles...
/me mumbles bittlerly and goes back into his development hole :P
"Which is why I will never trust the Strategic Defence Initiative - the star wars project"
Strategic Defence Initiative = the star wars project
What was the thinking behind clarifying that to the Slashdot crowd?
Microprocessor, main processing unit of your computer...
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Talk about your flaming articles
Its fine to discuss a bug in a new Russian guidance system...but to immediately jump into a hot political topic like the SDI star wars system and then vastly overgeneralize it with "It'll never work, because it relies on computers" shouldn't have any place in this story.
"Which is why I will never trust the Strategic Defence Initiative - the star wars project. It only takes one line of mistyped code in what will always be a beta release."
Well, let's hope it stays in beta. Real world testing would be a major bummer!
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
"...high-anxiety off-course landing..."
Any landing that you can walk away from is a good landing. Especially when you're talking about a manned re-entry vehicle.
Lest we forget, the last time an Earth-bound crew were returning from space their orbiter disintegrated and all seven astronauts were killed. Landing a couple of hundred miles off course and having to wait two hours for groundside assistance is a small price to pay for a safe return.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
TMA-1? (Must suppress Arthur C. Clarke-inspired giggle).
Maybe the problem was in that gigantic magnetic field wiping some data... (TMA stands for Tycho Magnetic Anomaly, aka the monolith in 2001)
I think the next spacecraft (TMA-2) should be nicknamed "big brother."
What we in the West call "bugs", the Japanese call "spoilage". I find this nomenclature honest and refreshing. "Bug" implies that the problem is some independent agent, when in fact the problem is the "spoiled" code itself.
-kgj
By your logic I will never drive my car again. It's got so many embedded controllers and runs so much code that I could never trust it. Plus, it was written by evil capitalists and isn't under the GPL, so it obviously can't be reliable.
What total bullshit!
You sit behind a computer and critisize other computer people. You say things like, "Oh. Programmers sent our space men hurtling toward their firey grave."
Look at the facts. Not one space man perished in this. Space men have only died in shuttle disasters, such as in 1986 and also a few months ago. Nobody died from this Russian misfortune. Every man is OK.
Don't critisize so quickly, lest YOU get the same treatment.
I suggest you read Slashdot
the dept. forgets to read YOU!
sulli
RTFJ.
I hate to say this but Military Research has led to some of the biggest break throughs in our life time. Without the V1 and V2 rockets we wouldn't have had Saturn 5, Satelites, Velcro, Microwave ovens, High Strenght Materials, Computers, the Internet all can be traced back to military research.
Military research is a waste
Nearly everything researched is a dual use technology, much of it is directly applicable to the space program. Even with the time needed for a technology to become declassified we are most likely receiving that technology earlier than a pure civilian market would have provided it.
Secondly, if we did not have military research and only spent money on 'peace' we would soon be taken over by 'less enlightened' folks.
Well, not always. In the 70's (or early 80's ... I think the 70's) all of the Eastern block countries sent their cosmonauts to the Salyut space station (that was before Mir). The Bulgarian cosmonaut Georgi Ivanov was very close to having a deadly accident because of the Soyuz. They could not dock for some reason, spent about 24h flying by the Salyut, and finally had to re-enter using auxiliary engines, and having precisely one try to fire them. They got lucky here, the engines worked and they entered the atmosphere in so called "ballistic trajectory" (how can it be non-ballistic?), with 9-10G overload.
I forgot to mention, there were two of them, the Russian Nikolay Rukavishnikov was the commander of the mission, G. Ivanov was the second guy.
This spring, several weeks after Columbia broke apart, there was an interview with G. Ivanov in a Bulgarian newspaper online, when he recalled how he himself was close to having a fatal accident back then. The reason was a malfunctioning fuel pump of their Soyuz.
Does the sawed-off shotgun in the Souyz capsule to fight off wolves violate the provisions that demiliterize space?
l an dings.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/05/05/soyuz.
"In 1976, a Soyuz spacecraft came down in a freezing squall and splashed into a lake; the crew spent the night bobbing in the capsule.
Eleven years before that, two cosmonauts overshot their touchdown site by 2,000 miles and found themselves deep in a forest with hungry wolves. That's when Russian space officials decided to pack a sawed-off shotgun aboard every spacecraft."
If they can launch a shotgun hundreds of times, then why can't the US launch some lasers?
I'm confused.
In Soviet Russia, joke explanation reads YOU!
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's actually a clever piece of work. Basically, software has to make calculations in order to provide a "soft" entry, 5 Gs approximately. If there is an error, the module goes into a ballistic entry mode, and it is more like 7-8 Gs, rougher but survivable.
On (nearly) every manned spacecraft ever flown, every system has a hot-backup that kicks in if the first one fails. The exceptions are systems for which it is basically impractical to have a backup-- can't really have redundant heat shields, as the weight is too much. But for electronics and software, this is standard. This story would have gone practically unnoticed if Soyuz had notified Star City that they were doing a "ballistic" entry, in which case they would have been located much sooner.
This landing showed that the Soyuz has a robust design; if Endeavour enters the atmosphere at the wrong angle, could it recover? What if the flight landing computer failed? NASA has a lot of these things covered; for many problems it is probably more robust than Soyuz, for others it is less robust. Soyuz has the advantage of much more flight experience; I doubt that it's a coincidence that this anomaly happened on a flight with a newly upgraded Soyuz.
As everyone knows, SDI cannot stop terrorists from flying planes into buildings, using suitcase nuclear weapons, launching missiles from off-shore platforms, etc, etc.
But, SDI is really another way to spend billions on research (just like the space race used to be the research money hole). There is no doubt good things will come from it, but at a very high cost.
I mean, I'd hate to be shot in the face by a space laser.
It's funny to notice, that in Russian newspapers the reason for this lending trouble is stated as "the American cosmonaut pushed the wrong button so the capsule started acting up..." Obviously the guy did not receive any previous training in landing procedures on this capsule, so he pushed the first familiar button, I guess. Again, interesting why they say one thing in Russia and completely different thing here??? Any ideas???
In order to get a story submitted, it must have a snide remark or overgeneralization. Articles that aren't flamebait are boring, apparently. Especially with timothy and michael picking the stories. Those two horse's asses are the biggest trolls and FUDders on Slashdot. CmdrTaco is up there too, though he just likes to post duplicate stories (can't bother reading his own site) and whine about SPAM.
Actually, they don't know if it was a software bug. At this point that is pure (though somewhat educated) speculation.
The only thing known for certain, is that the backup guidance system took over and landed the craft safely.
It is possible that pilot error caused the switch to backup, or mechanical failure, or a software design error, or a software bug.
Why is it all the news stories recently in the US press recently seem to have a dismissive, almost mocking, view of the Russian space programme? Words like primative, old technology, not as advanced as American keep coming up over and over again. The Russians have vastly more experience in manned space flight than the Americans and arguably a much better success ratio. It pisses me off the "American must be better" attitude you see in the western press these days. They should remember who it is keeping the whole ISS alive while the shuttle isn't around.
I saw an interview over the weekend with the space Tourist guy where the fact that this particular capsule was one of the first Soyuz with a "glass cockpit", similar to what has recently been installed on the shuttle fleet.
As a software QA guy, I know what kinds of havok a UI defect can cause in a software package. Is it possible that insufficient QA is going into the interface software for these "Glass Cockpits"? There's a time and place for everything, and at the moment, I'd feel a lot better with hardware switches for most spacecraft function (particularly with something as old as Soyuz) than with the kinds of UIs that I've seen in terrestrial software...
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
I guess the point wasa little subtle for you, but if we can't bring back a spacecraft successfully...do you really have faith in a software system's ability to shoot down an incoming missile...
Your point was an editorial opinion. This is Slashdot, "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Slashdot is a place for summaries and links to news stories...but not these politically left/right wing or ignorant opinions of news stories.
Really, would Slashdot be a great site if all you saw were stories like these?
Anthrax Genes Mapped
xeroxman writes "The BBC reports that scientists have mapped out the genes that make up anthrax. Personally, I find this scary. Mother Nature never intended for us to gain the knowledge of what makes diseases so deadly. This could easily fall into the wrong hands."
Georgia Plans For More Broadband
southener writes "According to the Atlanta journal, the state government is spending $500 million to lay fiber to more cities. Ya, great plan Georgia...what a waste of money. 20% of the state's population lives in poverty. I'll never vote for those Democrats again."
Linus Turns Up Dead
An anonymous coward writes "Sad news today. Linus Torvalds was found dead on the side of I-5 outside of Oakland. No other details as of yet. We can only hope that Christians won't make this more painful for us all by saying he's now living in this magical "heaven" place..."
The head of the Energiya Space Corporation Yury Semenov said that all possible causes of the inaccurate landing were being examined.
"We must examine all causes. ... There was a version (of events) that (flight commander) Nikolai Budarin pushed a button on the control panel," he told the ITAR-TASS news agency.
Go figger...the events to follow should be interesting.
db
Cig:
ôô
You greedy moderators are all bastards. I wanted to mod this +funny, but selfish moderators before me already capped the post! CAPPED THE FUCKING POST!!!
It all goes downhill from first post
Cruise missiles do not fly intercontinental distances, at least no sane designs intended to carry thermonuclear warheads. And while they're nowhere near as visible as missiles coming in on a ballistic arc, they are very slow (compared to spacebourne weapons) and simple for conventional anti-air defenses to hit. Realistic nuclear cruise missiles are tactical weapons designed hundreds of miles at best, and even then require some sort of air superiority in the target zone and/or an undetected firing platform (such as a nuclear submarine). And this says nothing of the required technology base to build one.
Stratiegic Defense Initiative is intended to take out stratiegic nuclear weapons, the ones that are designed to cross oceans. And the only realistic way to get a missle to fly over oceans (without a fleet of B-52s hovering just outside the target's borders) is to lob them over a sub-orbital arc. These weapons are essentially in free-fall as soon as the boosters fall away, which happens well before the warhead crosses the target's horizon.
"but I'd assume any country capable of launching nukes from a distance could setup the missiles to fly erratic flight plans."
Consider the decades of time between the development of ICBMs and cruise missiles. And again, these missiles would have trouble crossing the Atlantic Ocean, let alone the Pacific. What are these missiles going to do, hook up to a refuelling jet two or three times during its flight?
The focus on stopping ballistic missiles is both because such missiles are the easiest to build (remember that ballistic missiles were used in WWII) and the most difficult to stop. Any other form of delivery can be stopped by conventional means.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
The crew of that Tornado GR.4 belonging to 9 Squadron RAF Marham were known for their concientious attitude towards their work along with their great experience on Tornados.
Neither officer was reknowned for 'goofing-off' as they knew like any-other RAF crew that such behaviour leads to a court-martial in jig-time.
It is know that they were in the right place at the right time and it might also be worth pointing out that it is highly unlikely that they would deactivate the IFF when they knew that Rapier systems were deployed (You don't even know they are there till they fire).
The current status of this 'friendly-fire' incident according to both the US and UK is that it is under investigation. you may like to read this article on possible bugs in the Patriot system software.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
What you're talking about is component level testing. Unfortunately, all that testing doesn't substitute for a true "shakedown" integration test. Look up the AEGIS cruiser system (actually sort of a mini-SDI for a ship). On it's first full integration test, it failed to shoot down 6 out of 17 targets due to software errors. Now, make the integrated platform 2 orders of magnitude more complicated than that (and at least one order of magnitude more complicated than ANY software project attempted to date) and you can see why I'm skeptical of the chances of SDI working as advertised.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Here's a system that failed gracefully. Consider a simple taxonomy of software bugs:
/corrupt/ data. A kernel panic serves exactly the same purpose. The kernel detects that it can no longer rely on itself, instead of continuing to operate it shuts down. The potential consequences of continuing in any form, might results in writing random or bad data to the hard drive, or who knows what else. It's better to system panic and stop doing anything.
- you lose data
- you corrupt data
The second one is far, far worse because the failure makes changes to your data and you know longer know what is right and what is wrong. The same situation maps onto this failure. The automatic primary system failed, and lost data. But it did not
Code that fails gracefully is good code.
simon
home page
No, it might not always be a beta release.
We hope it will always be a beta release.
There is a possibility that the code will be tested enough in the real world to reach "production" status, but we hope the situations which exercise it in the real world will never happen.
Which is why I will never trust the Strategic Defence Initiative - the star wars project. It only takes one line of mistyped code in what will always be a beta release.
You could use that argument against any weapons system that uses a computer. You could also further expand that statement to say that computers can never be used for important tasks. It is amazing how quickly politics can make luddites of us, isn't it?