Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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
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
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
You'd think that in such operations, where you only ever get one chance, they would have the most error free systems possible.
They do go to great lengths to remove the errors. In fact the Challenger investigation singled out the methods used for validating the shuttle's software as a model for the other parts of the program to follow in improving safety. Also, the article said that the backup system kicked in automatically and led to a safe, albeit off-target, landing. So in fact the overall system worked as expected.
And as for the "big mistakes", it's very easy to point fingers afterward and boil a problem down to a catch phrase. However, engineers aren't idiots; almost all accidents involving spacecraft are a result of a long string of seemingly innocuous miscommunications, coincidences, and bad luck. Consider the story of the Ariane 5, which was destroyed because of an overlooked feature in a piece of code reused from a smaller rocket. No software engineer can say that they haven't made a similar mistake.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
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.
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.
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.
They build them strong - snipped from an entry for soyuz 5 :
"Volynov remained behind for what was undoubtedly the most unbelievable re-entry ever survived. The PAO service module of the Soyuz failed to separate after retrofire. While this had occurred on various Vostok and Voskhod flights, and on one Mercury flight, it was a much more serious problem for Volynov, where the module was much larger than a small retropack. Furthermore, once it started reaching the tendrils of the atmosphere, the combined spacecraft sought the most aerodynamically stable position - nose forward, with the heavy descent module with its light metal entry hatch at the front, the less dense service module with its flared base to the back. Volynov at once appraised the situation and considered all possibilities and realised that there was nothing he could really do.
The spacecraft was re-entering air-lock forward and with every minute the G forces increased. Volynov did his duty with all of his strength but this became increasingly difficult since he was hanging in the straps of his seat with the G forces assailing him in the opposite direction from what planned. Soon a strong smell penetrated the cabin - the rubber gaskets of the hermetic seal of the hatch were burning. The hatch had a light covering of heat protective resins, but at the last moment these could not hold out and the vaporised into fumes that immediately spread throughout the cabin. Volynov could remain conscious for only a few seconds after this.
He remained alive when a miracle occurred - a miracle for which he could thank the designers who had included a strong titanium frame which helped the airlock hold out against the onslaught of the superheated plasma. The PAO service module finally separated from the SA re-entry vehicle. The capsule turned around to an aerodynamically stable position at hypersonic speed and the heat shield finally took the brunt of the heating as designed. The spacecraft continued on a 9 G ballistic trajectory. The damage to the capsule resulted in a failure of the soft-landing rockets. The landing was harder than usual and Volynov broke his teeth. The capsule was recovered 2 km SW of Kustani, far short of its aim point, on January 18, 1969 at 07:58 GMT. It would be seven years until Volynov flew again, on Soyuz 21. "
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
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.
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