Mars Failures: Bad luck or Bad Programs?

HobbySpacer writes "One European mission is on its way to Mars and two US landers will soon launch. They face tough odds for success. Of 34 Mars missions since the start of the space age, 20 have failed. This article looks at why Mars is so hard. It reports, for example, that a former manager on the Mars Pathfinder project believes that "Software is the number one problem". He says that since the mid-70s "software hasnâ(TM)t gone anywhere. There isnâ(TM)t a project that gets their software done."" Or maybe it has to do with being an incredible distance, on an inhumane climate. Either or.

Comments

Old news

[nick-less]

He says that since the mid-70s "software hasnâ(TM)t gone anywhere.

as we didn't allready knew this...

Re:We landed on the moon with 512 bytes of RAM

[lethalwp]

Probably not with microsoft

http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/what_real ly _happened_with_the_columbia.jpg

The ancient n-body system...

[Krapangor]

..well it's the problem. At least part of the problem. The other part is that both engineers, physicists and computer scientists fail to acknowledge the advances in dynamical systems theory made in the last 50 years.
Anybody who has a clue in mathematics know that the above mentioned disciplines usually work with a style of mathematics which was state of art 80 years ago. Physicists refuse to write anything down in non-tensorial, coordinate free form, engineers usually don't even know what a manifold or a singularity is (wondering why they can't solve that damn non-linear equation) and CS guys normally work with highschool calculus/prob. theory with a little Fourier transforms from the engineers mixed in (though they won't ever touch the Laplace transform, dunno why; that's really weird).
I must admit that some HEP guys have a clue of mathematics (hey, sometimes they even use the DeRham-cohomology, that's senior year stuff !), but most others won't.

Well, and there their problem starts. The n-body problem is known to be chaotic with n>2. These problem can be handles but not the naive, ancient ways. You would have to use some non-linear control, Finser space stuff, nonlinear dynamical systems theory maybe even some resolution of singularities. You might want to throw even some stochastic control, but that's not critical.
The tools are backed by the works of Anosov, Arnol'd, Lobachevski, Thom, Isidori, Cheng, Smale, Picard and Zariski.
However, you must know and understand them to use them. And at this point CS freaks, engineers and physicists usually fail. They claim that "there was this crack" or "we confused metrics" but at the very core of the problem they didn't understood the problem and the tools to solve it.

And NASA the engineers early-retirement bandwagon fails to hire any mathematicians but only engineers, CS guys and physicists instead. Well, we all physicists, CS guys and engineers here, why should we let any mathematicians take over ?

And BOOM there goes another 163 million space probe.

The "Complexity Trap"

[ites]

This is from my latest novel, "the Complexity Trap":

Mankind found themselves trapped on a small, smelly, dying planet. Reaching the moon seemed easy, but this nascent race of spacefarers soon found that gravity was much easier to beat than complexity. For every step forwards, they took twenty steps sideways and five steps back. It took generations and a genius to understand that they were trapping themselves in their own technology. The solution, finally, was simple. They created a simple, robust artificial organism and launched it into space. Instead of trying to overcome the challenges of interplanetary and interstellar travel by intellectual brute force, they would let evolution and selection do the the work for them.

Time went by... and the organisms dispersed and flourished. Eating methane space crumbs, basking in solar radiation, they spread to the farthest, darkest corners of the solar system, and - hitching a ride on the occasional comet - beyond.

An Eon passed, and mankind forgot all about their space seedlings. But deep in the liquid depths of one of the giants of their solar system, something stirred...

Next episode coming soon...

OK, my point is: let's concentrate on trying to get clean water to everyone on earth before throwing such huge amounts away on space games. Simple things make life better for all, and humanity's basic resource is not knowledge, science, or exploration, but humans.