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

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.