Slashdot Mirror
Mars Rovers Have Incorrect Instruments Installed
Christopher Reimer writes "The New Scientist is reporting that the twin Mars rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, has instruments installed in the wrong rovers. From the article: 'While the bungle does not undermine the main scientific conclusions drawn from the data collected by the rovers, it is an embarrassing slip-up for a space agency that once lost a Mars spacecraft because engineers mixed up metric and imperial units.'"
Who knew being a rocket scientist was so tough.
they would have made them identicle execpt for the APXS thing we wouldn't have the problem. Also do they look alike or very similar? If they dont thats crazy.
Twin Mars rovers, Opportunity and Spirit landed on the Moon.
I really want to support NASA, i lvoe the space agency, i love space exploration. It is a nessasary compoenent of being a human, of being an adventurer. But come on, give me something to work with. It is getting hard to support NASA, it is getting hard to advocate for them when they keep fucking things up.
How can i possibly advocate for a mars mission when they can't even get this shit right?
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
Do they even read what they write? has, not have?
Subject says it all - mod me down if you have never read Mark Twain :)
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
They instruments were installed correctly on Earth. It's the Martians that switched them as a prank. :-)
So the male is really female and vice versa?
I guess this isn't the first time geeks get confused about parts and mix them up...
Remember - the rovers were built by the lowest bidder.
"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
...Delete the Appearance Group and just have the #$@% pinstriping done in Tijuana. But did they listen to me? NOooo.
It annoys me that so much is made of this problem. This in no way compares to the lost spacecraft error, it's simply a calibration adjustment to a sensor. I think the fact that they have two rovers that have performed extremely well under harsh conditions 4x over their rated life is an incredible accomplishment. This just sounds like someone looking for sensationalism in a non-issue.
It's like the evil KITT From Knight Rider.
To clarify the summary: it's not that the WRONG instruments were installed, but that the SAME instruments were installed but calibrated for the OPPOSITE rovers. So, the data have been slightly off in a predictable way. In the end, it's not too surprising nor is it devastating. The data is still valid and is being readjusted.
Click
Mix the failings of Usenet with the shortcomings of the World Wide Web and the result is slashdot.
They're the same device on each machine, with the same function. The only problem has been that the data received has been interpreted with the wrong calibration adjustments. Swap the calibration adjustments and rerun the data, and it'll be correct.
It would have been far worse if, say, one had a spectroscope and the other had a *drill*, and they were swapped, and each rover couldn't use the other's tool. And in that kind of a switch, it would be really bad, because the two devices would be visually distinct. But the swapping of two devices that are 99.99% identical, on two rovers that are identical, is no big thing.
Compared to the fact that the rovers are still running long after they were expected to die, this is a tiny, tiny thing.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
At least they landed 'em on the right planet.
OK, now what?
While the lead scientist says that it wasn't a big deal and no investigation will be held, I think he isn't analyzing the significance of this event. While scientists are more focused on the validity of data, engineers have to analyze not just events that occur (like loss of a rover), but also events that could occur. Putting the wrong instrument into a rover is due to "failure to follow procedure". This is a big deal. Failure to follow procedures could have been caught by a better QA system, better monitoring of the installation, and better training (including walkthroughs on the installation of the instruments).
Even though this minor event that has had no impact on the mission, it has shown that there are holes in JPL's QA system, their monitoring system, and their training program for building these rovers. If you want to dig further you might find that all of these problems were caused by an unnecessary sense of urgency which may have been caused by poor project planning. These exact problems have caused the loss of spacecraft before (and many of them were cited for the loss of Challenger and Columbia).
No investigation? The lead scientist really needs to take a look at his project management priorities. Having experience working in nuclear power I have learned and have been trained that small problems are many times the only symptoms of much larger problems. The lead scientist's attitude on the problem gives me no confidence in his ability to run a more complicated mission. Like in gambling, one or two successes doesn't mean that you are going to win on the next roll.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
Let the New Scientist criticize from the cheap seats. It is hard to argue that the rovers have been anything other than a resounding success for over 400 days. I would have hoped /. would
instead print the recent story of the Spirit Rover
discovering
salty soil.
an ill wind that blows no good
"There was a point when both of them were sitting on the same bench, and that has to have been it."
Wouldn't they have been labeled, what does this have to do with anything?
Turns out they really landed on Uranus.
Pathfinder also carried an APXS, but the data was largely worthless because the Germans who made the instrument didn't bother calibrating it at all.
From the JPL website: "Meanwhile, scientists are re-calibrating data from both rovers' alpha particle X-ray spectrometers. These instruments are used to assess targets' elemental composition. The sensor heads for the two instruments were switched before launch. Therefore, data that Opportunity's spectrometer has collected have been analyzed using calibration files for Spirit's, and vice-versa. Fortunately, because the sensor heads are nearly identical, the effect on the elemental abundances determined by the instruments was very small. The scientists have taken this opportunity to go back and review the results for the mission so far and re-compute using correct calibration files. "The effect in all cases was less than the uncertainties in results, so none of our science conclusions are affected," Squyres said." It would have been more serious if they had lost the calibrations on the instruments.
I've got your sig, right here.
"Often-Wrong's got a broken heart, can't even tell his boys apart!"
This instrumentation calibration error issue does not surprise me, and if it were work hours I'd be making a couple phone calls to bolster my own guess at the root cause.
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There reason the MAJORITY of recent mars missions failed is gender and race bias in hiring and promotion against whites and asians.
Vital FACT! Nasa switched to forced female hiring in most of the recent Mars failures.
For the first time ever ONLY WOMEN called the shots on the largest mars mission that failed. read
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/ 04 1899nasa-women.html
for the first time ever all three KEY positions of the failed mars missions were female
Sarah A. Gavit = the mars project manager
Suzanne E. Smrekar, 37, the lead mars scientist
Kari A. Lewis= the mars project's chief engineer
Current hiring rules from the new top level NASA female administration dictate this new female forced hiring policy.
NASA has hiring policies that try to hire women DESPITE IQ or experience. In fact they now PREVENT job related award honors and bonuses based on how many females you hire and how many females and black contractors you hire!!! This is a fact!
NASA publicly has stated this from the woman in charge. I can't tell you about my own memos.
NASA is proud to boast 2% female active engineers minimum and that is WAY out of whack with societies norms.
The mars missions are even more than 2% female.
The average IQ of a Caucasian US Male holding a medical degree is IQ 124, but as the front page of the San Jose Mercury proclaimed in huge block letter headlines, and millions of IQ scores show (see the Bell Curve book data), the chance of a FEMALE obtaining a test score of 124 is EIGHT TIMES LESS LIKELY than an equivalent male. EIGHT TIMES LESS LIKELY. Conversely very low IQ people are almost always males. The average IQ is the same for both genders 100, but the IQ distribution bell curves are dramatically different shapes.
NASA boasts a female-minority web site documenting how not only are contractors hired by whether or not they are female or black but what state their small companies reside in! NASA apparently requires all 50 states to have minority participation in parts design and supply for the mars missions! REGARDLESS of competence! Sex and race are the prime criteria for 1999. Check out NASA own detailed list of female and minority small contractors at : http://sbir.nasa.gov. SBIR is a euphemistic acronym for small business innovation research, but as you can easily see it is actually a gender and race quota based system spearheaded by the new women helping to run NASA now.
from the female mars leader
"Women have really added to the workplace because we do come at things from a different angle," she said.
"For the same reason that cultural diversity works, gender diversity is wonderful, too, especially when you're trying to do something creative."
Also from the female mars leader Gavit:
"The fact that we're women hasn't made a difference," she said. "It's not an issue here. But it's good that young girls see that engineering and technical fields are wide open to women. That's the good thing about saying it's a woman-led team."
The report in The Guardian (British) December 7th a couple years ago included the following comment: "The total launch and development costs of NASA's lost Mars spacecraft is put at $320 million.
Forced hiring of women disregarding IQ score or talent created this staggering $320 million loss and many more female related losses are already in the works.
Kennedy Space Center rents out IMAX II theaters for a wizbang "Take Our Daughters To Work Day" the recent theme was about how the shuttle is now COMMANDED by a female and last years motto was "The Future is Me".
Even study grants awarded from NASA are targeted to females now at expense of males : refer to Federal Re
>once lost a Mars spacecraft because engineers mixed up metric and imperial units.
I'm getting pretty tired of this sound (text?) bite the media throws out. It wasn't mixed up units; it was error accumulation from switching back and forth between the units.
If we hadn't caught this error, we might have thought that they had weapons of mass destruction and wasted a few hundred billion dollars in a crusade to kill tens of thousands of freeze-dried martians.
Put a Post-It note on each one, problem solved. Why must everything be so difficult?
So, let me get this straight: NASA has managed to successfully send two completely functional rovers to the planet Mars 45 million miles away. Since they have arrived, the two rovers have expanded our understanding of the planet greatly and have had few and mostly correctable errors. They are now way, way past their expected mission time and are still running, and a few people have the nerve around to here to bash NASA for their horrible, numerous mistakes?
This stuff isn't easy. Just because you reap the benefits of the entire space program from your living room couch via the TV without actually contributing one bit does not mean you have any understanding of how complex and spectacular these great accomplishments are.
To the NASA / JPL engineers and scientists: Thanks.
When NASA makes a mistake the howls of glee echo across England for a long, long time. Whereas when, say, Beagle, craps out, those same howling gumbies go strangely silent. Weird.
Building something exactly to spec is impossible.
I know... the contractors we hired to build our house built an outhouse instead of a house. Well, we'll give them credit for taking initiative and being innovative.
A hermit writes: "The Church is reporting that the two human genders, male and female, have instruments installed in the wrong genders. From the article: 'While the bungle does not undermine the main reproductive conclusions from the reproductive activities between genders, it is an embarrassing slip-up for a supreme being that once lost a world of worshippers to a flood because the first prototypes mixed up good and evil.'"
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Then ask yourself how many times identical twins that you've known managed to play some trick on you.
And can we tone down the headline sensationalism a bit? You'd think the rovers have a core drill where there should be a camera or something. They somehow managed to switch two spectrometers, as identical as modern metallurgy can make them, destined for two similarly identical rovers - and now the error's been uncovered and the data recomputed. Jeesh...
Bashing NASA, and by association the USA, is important because it makes me feel better about the fact that my own nation can't even successfully build, for example, cars which don't leak oil and need to be pushed to a garage everytime I go out to buy bread or milk.
The same people who are laughing about this error were strangely silent regarding the Beagle fuck-up. Can't imagine why, can you?
Because they're rovers,
Identical rovers, you will find...
They look alike, they rove alike,
They even calibrate alike!
(Should I put this alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer in you...or you? Whoooaaaa!)
You will lose your mind!
When rovers...are two of a kind!
Identical Rovers! Tuesdays at 8 on SCTV!
that the martians pull this prank on Mars instead of White crater in NZ.
but lets keep it in perspective... these people PUT ROVERS ON MARS
a whole boatload of things had to go exactly correct for it to work at all. to find one chink in the system and think of it as a screwup is like looking at the -- well I can't think of anything it's like, but it's lame.
...Again? I swear, everytime I hear news about something launched in the space, there are follow up stories about YAMUF (Yet Another Measurement Unit Farkup).
I hear the same thing happened to the Olsen twins.
Don't ask me...I'm not sure what it means either.
"This Martian hotrod better get at least a million miles to the gallon!"
The average IQ of a Caucasian US Male holding a medical degree is IQ 124, but as the front page of the San Jose Mercury proclaimed in huge block letter headlines, and millions of IQ scores show (see the Bell Curve book data), the chance of a FEMALE obtaining a test score of 124 is EIGHT TIMES LESS LIKELY than an equivalent male. EIGHT TIMES LESS LIKELY. Conversely very low IQ people are almost always males. The average IQ is the same for both genders 100, but the IQ distribution bell curves are dramatically different shapes.
IQ doesn't necessarily translate into real world performance, that's why it is typically not used as a metric for jobs. You can argue experience and education which are more reliable metrics for performance, however, you did not provide facts based on that.
Also, I didn't realize there were no missions that exploded or failed before women were put in charge. Were there no men at all involved in any parts of the project, or who had the responsibility of oversight at some level (ie 2nd tier managers)? Although the top level managers were women, at some level probably some men screwed up too.
I'm not going to argue about the impact of gender/minority based hiring policies, I'm just saying your conclusions in this specific case are flawed. At the highest levels managers are responsible for higher level management practices, not individual screw-ups. Your arguement is along the lines of holding the CEO of IBM responsible because your laptop had a too many bad pixels.
There are high level issues that do need to be addressed. I see the Mars Spacecraft loss as part of an overall epidemic of poor execution and quality control at NASA. Hubble, Columbia, Challenger, Galileo, Cassini, etc. all had issues, you can't just hold one project that happened to be completely managed by women and say "See the problem is women."
NASA itself is in trouble, and I'd venture to guess it's alot deeper than it's hiring practices.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Why did they use imperial in the first place? Scientist are supposed to always use metric.
Because I have low karma, I need pills.
Who cares, tell us about Mars Volta.
Once the mistake was realized, they could easily accomodate it through other calibration techniques. I think the parent article is trying to raise a sandstorm in an otherwise rarefied atmosphere.
Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish
Thats the way we do things, lad, we're making shit up as we wish
yeah nasa...
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
Even if we don't look at it from a racial or sex standpoint, it's easy to see that when you want to set a "filter" to get the best samples from a pool of options, you filter based on the criteria that you want. If you want good engineers, you test them based on their engineering skill ALONE and you don't look at anything else. Hire the most skilled people first, and only then should you look to see who you hired.
When you artificially set quotas based on criteria that doesn't lend itself to getting the job done, you're contaminating your selection.
Test on ability alone. Hiring based on gender or race is just a bad idea. Let the results do the talking. Affirmative action contaminates your talent pool by letting unqualified people slip through.
...put Burt Rutan in charge of the mission.
The article says the errors can be corrected, so I don't really see what all the fuss is about:
Fortunately, now that the goof-up has been spotted, it is easily fixed by reanalysing the raw data with the right calibration. Corrected values for the first year's data will be available soon, says Steve Squyres, the chief scientist for the rovers.
In further new, a NASA spokesperson announced that they had actually only sent one rover to Mars. Apparently, a last minute mixup resulted in only one rover and one Oregon Scientific WMR968 Wireless Weather Station being put into the launch craft. Researchers asked for comment claimed that "we are relieved, because this explains why all of the queries we sent Spirit returned '-34 degrees centigrate' and the accelerometer always read '10 millibars'."
'm not going to argue about the impact of gender/minority based hiring policies, I'm just saying your conclusions in this specific case are flawed. At the highest levels managers are responsible for higher level management practices, not individual screw-ups. Your arguement is along the lines of holding the CEO of IBM responsible because your laptop had a too many bad pixels.
Ever hear the saying "shit rolls downhill"?
If you put an incompetent leader up top, the bad decisions will trickle down. Anyone who disagrees with these bad ideas coming from above will be overruled by the higher authority.
The kingpin is very important. The chain of command starts there. With a bad CEO of a company, it's very possible to begin to get more bad pixels in your laptop screen. What if the CEO wanted to streamline the business and aim for lower production costs at the expense of quality? While one person may find that price/quality ratio unacceptable, the new CEO may have different values and consider it acceptable. Anyone below him who disgreed would most likely be forced to agree with his decision, or be forced out of the company. Look what Carly did to HP, or what Enron's leaders did to that company.
This was a follow up mission to the Viking landers which found no signs of life on Earth.
Squyres is "not embarrassed at all" about the slip-up with the rovers. "It was an easy mistake to make," he says. "It happened during some very busy and stressful times."
-- Weak as piss guy's!
[..]an embarrassing slip-up for a space agency that once lost a Mars spacecraft because engineers mixed up metric and imperial units.
Which wouldn't be a problem if the US would get with the program and switch to metric. Most of the rest (if not all of the rest) of the world has already done it. I don't know how scientists and engineers there can stand having to deal with that outmoded, ridiculous imperial system.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
... Which is why large corporations tend to hire Quality Assurance people. It's also why development teams tend to deploy to a testing environment before launching something live.
It's a very common concept in business, so why can't NASA seem to get it down?
I'm sure that there are many things to double check when it comes to spacecraft, but NASA has so many of these "human error" problems all the time, it seems. They really need to hire such a group now. If there's already a QA group for the project (which I am hoping/assuming there is), then you hire a second group to QA the first QA groups results. You can never have too many people reviewing your results, if perfection is your goal.
And NASA has to do this like yesterday! Every one of these "oops's" is seen as yet another mistake by those who fund such programs. True, NASA has had some success recently, in particular w/Mars related missions, but even those successes are peppered with failures... For example, the probe going into Saturns moons didn't run some tests because it was never turned on before it was launched. Sorry, I don't have a link off-hand, but I remember there were several articles I read at the time pointing out how months, if not years of planning were wasted due to this error.
And more oop's mean less funding for future projects... In todays world of cutbacks, NASA can't afford screwups like these.
Do the words "configuration management" mean anything to the geeks at JPL? The problem is acceptable but the attitude that this is minor is a bad one (especially from the chief scientist). Obviously JPL doesn't have a PR dept to screen boobs like him (another lack of control).
Fortunately, JPL was both lucky and (they truely are) good in this case.
Quite fitting that itunes would start playing 'History Repeating' by the Propellerheads featuring Shirley Bassey as I begin reading this story...
Seems to me that you might be able to design it in such a way as to keep the calibration data with the instrument, like in an E2 or something.
I imagine that's a bit like having a plural form of a verb in a sentence intended for a singular form?
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
Wow, given how the results have been far from certain even when they supposedly did things right and given the phenomenal successes that the rovers have enjoyed despite NASA's mistakes, I heartily propose the answer to our space program lies in figuring out a way to make these mistakes more often!
Had either of the Mars Rovers crashed or broken in some way, this mistake would never have been discovered. With only 1 rover's data, there would be no mysterious discrepency to solve and this mistake would have never been resolved.
So scientists would have spent the next 10 years developing their theories of martian geology based on incorrect data if either one of those rovers hadn't deployed and you call this a minor issue?!
This kind of error is inexcusable. But of course, it'll get brushed over because NASA was lucky enough to be in a position to fix it.
...and it proceeded to install those instuments all over the surface of mars.
Spirit and Opportunity have performed incredibly well. These guys deserve nothing but respect.
You know, Compared to mixing up metric and imperial units, this seems downright intelligent of them.
Okay, I was in the meeting where the difference in calibration was discussed, and I was the one that suggested that the instrument packages should be marked so that the right package would be installed in the right lander.
I recommended that one package should be marked with an "O" for "Spirit" and the other with an "S" for "Opportunity". I even donated the Sharpie marker and masking tape for this purpose.
It's not my fault that the implementation was screwed up. It's those numbnuts in the Vehicle Assembly Department who can't read a bloody memo.
Fortunately, I've left NASA for a position at the Department of Defense. My team is tasked with identifying sites related to the constructon of weapons of mass destrucion in South Korea.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Well that explains why I got a chemical spectrum analyzer in the mail and not my xbox. So where is my xbox now?
Maybe NASA can send out for a power cord replacement.
Nobody duplicated the experiments to confirm the results?
I've been meaning to pick up a spectrometer and test Mars myself...
That means we must bash the hell out of them. Beagle was English...so we'd best shut the fuck up about its failure.
... the less they're worth.
Words to men, as air to birds.
To get more accurate results, just let the rovers drive to the same location and have each measure the same rocks.
Bert
(Yes, their tiny wheels can't do that. While scientifically correct, it was supposed to be funny).
Technically it may be moot since luckily a swap of the calibration files will make the data come up clean.
Public Relations-wise it may be dumb since it is a mission that has already been amazingly successful and beyond its lifetime.
But the reality is that this datapoint gives us a very good picture of the state of the art of engineering and the limits of humans' ability to
manage complex systems.
I noticed this recently as I had the opportunity to translate to English the investigations of nuclear reactor incidents in Japan.
They are really very subtle things, and if the person off the street read them they would sound a lot like this. But they include some things
this does not: 1) a full report of who did what with results of interviews, 2) identification of financial motives entering the management process, and 3) identification of changes to make sure this will never happen again.
Of course it is very scary for even a single "moot" incident to occur if the lives of local residents are on the line. With robotic roveres there is nobody to get killed.
If the public was educated from a young age to enjoy engineering challenges, then it would be safe to provide technical details of errors and it would be a positive thing. In the U.S. it is not clear whether it would be an argument for or against funding.
So it may be good to minimize this incident from a PR standpoint, and scientifically it is a "resolved issue", but management-wise you could say NASA and Squires (of whom I am immensely proud and that's my alma mater!) dodged a bullet, or "lucked out".
I too wondered "why didn't they stick a label on it?" but of course you can't stick a label on a file, and it costs money, and every physical characteristic of the label could affect something, etc. Some things may be "unlabelable" invisible differences.
The point is not that these guys are not like the cartoon characters some lame ass mentioned. They are among the finest scientists in their field on our planet. The problem with U.S. journalism is a cancer of the entire U.S. culture that is a dumbing down, "thuggification" and reign
of stupidity that indicates something is terribly wrong.
No, the point here is that some engineering systems, like nuclear reactors and interplanetary probes, are so immensely complicated and difficult to manage, while being so expensive, in other words they push the envelope so much, that miniscule incidents creep in which can snowball to have terrible consequences.
I happen also to have translate a long lawsuit about a big airplane crash. Basically a massive failure in a well engineered and tested system
usually seems to be due to a collection of things all going wrong (or being dangerously designed in a subtle way that blows up) at once.
We need more advanced automated management systems, or we need simpler systems, or we need to scale back our ambitions. I do not think the last is a valid choice. The first two indicate a need for more advanced technology.
It is also possible to try to improve the environment in which these efforts are made to reduce stress and potentially damaging factors such as
having a financial sword hanging over your head (Squires did say it was a very stressful time), scheduling more buffer time, and reducing public relations and other factors that could increase the emotional cost of failure.
If it doesn't exist already, it might also be useful to have professional psychologists on board as investigators who would provide input to a
computer system to include the general health and mental status of all individuals involved and provide a running estimate of a human risk level, to suggest the instantaneous probability of human error.
Perhaps something like this does exist, for example such a staff psychologist did work in the short story by Robert Heinlein, "Blowups Happen"
about the stress of nuclear engineers forced to run a power plant very close to the point of chain r
God those suck. Thank fuck the Japs can make decent cars. I'd hate to still be using Austins or any other english piece-of-shit-mobile. I'm old enough to remember what it was like in my country when we had only shitty pommy cars and the odd Holden.
Did they really think those 'Controller-less' modems would stand up? Next they will be admitting they put Windows CE on it.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
How do they know that they installed the ASPXs in the wrong rovers? Maybe they're looking at the wrong clipboard, or monitor? Maybe their labs were installed incorrectly? What if all of this is for nothing! How many more taxpayer dollars are we going to throw away before we realize that we're actually on Mars now?!!
Stuff that matters.
Hey, Dr. Kelloway. Funny thing happened on the way to Mars.
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
it is an embarrassing slip-up for a space agency that once lost a Mars spacecraft because engineers mixed up metric and imperial units.
NASA - National... the name speaks for itself...
Engineers, I've found, have a fetish for English units. In my first "real engineering" course, thermodynamics, the professor used pounds, feet, etc. almost exclusively. The first time I heard him talk about pounds I spit out my Descartes (you can't call that shit coffee...) and said "DID YOU JUST SAY 'POUND'!? IS IT STILL 1930!?!?!" (actually I just gave him a weird look, same difference...)
But yeah, despite the fact that scientists and other reasonable human beings standardize on SI, engineers seem to like using pounds.
My other car is first.
This from an ESA fanboy...
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
"On September 27, 1999, the operations navigation team consulted with the spacecraft engineers to discuss navigation discrepancies regarding velocity change (V) modeling issues. On September 29, 1999, it was discovered that the small forces V's reported by the spacecraft engineers for use in orbit determination solutions was low by a factor of 4.45 (1 pound force=4.45 Newtons) because the impulse bit data contained in the AMD file was delivered in lb-sec instead of the specified and expected units of Newton-sec."
My journal. Mainly about freedom.
Christopher Reimer writes "The New Scientist is reporting that the twin Mars rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, has instruments installed in the wrong rovers...
Twins HAVE, not HAS, Conjugate your verbs, people! Subject/Verb agreement is your friend. Remember basic English? TIGHTEN UP, EVERYONE!!
Sheesh!
... a rocket scientist isn't what it used to be.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
scientists are not gods
you'll find examples who drink too much, beat their wives, fudge data, exagerate findings, and make plain old dumb mistakes.
this is why you should take all the high profile, sky is falling we need more $, sceince stuff, including global warming, with a skeptical mind. there is just too much $ involved for everyone to be squeeaky clean and objective. i mean, look at the screw ups in science where there are not huge $ incentives for the individuals.
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Which is why large corporations tend to hire Quality Assurance people.
t ml
e /oct04/1004titan.html
Speaking of someone who builds GSE (ie non flight ground support equipment), I can assure you that JPL/NASA have world-class QA inspectors. FAR better than anything you find in 'business'. I've personally had many a miserable day because an 'i' wasnt dotted or a 't' wasnt crossed which was found by these QA folks. And I 'only' build the non-flight stuff!
If there's already a QA group for the project (which I am hoping/assuming there is), then you hire a second group to QA the first QA groups results. You can never have too many people reviewing your results, if perfection is your goal.
HOLY CRAP! That is -not- the way to QA! Too many review cycles stagnates into a complete inabaility to get anything done. What you describe is the way that 'modern' software companies try to do QA- and they fail miserably.
The way to good QA is to have a good production process with adequate double-checks in the process reviewed by an independant QA inspection team. The QA process works in a feedback loop that incoroporates lessons learned back into the process such that the process doesn't make those mistakes again. Good QA is about getting the production -process- right, not about putting unending numbers of inspectors into the mix! Actually, in situations like this that QA feedback loop encompases the design, fabrication, test, and operations portion of the mission.
It would be analagous in the software world to requiring you to design your software before ever writing a line of code, then having peer review and QA approve your design, and only then do you get to write code (and only to the approved design). Then, the QA team would look at the crap code that you wrote and reject it; requiring you to start over and write it correctly to the design. Interestingly enough, the people who write flight software for the shuttle work exactly that way, and they are the best the world has ever seen.
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff.h
For example, the probe going into Saturns moons didn't run some tests because it was never turned on before it was launched.
Your example demonstrates that you have no clue! You see, that prope called Huygens was an ESA built probe hitching a ride on a NASA spacecraft called Cassini. The Cassini recievers were not on because the commands sent to the spacecraft, which were supplied to NASA -by the ESA- only commanded ONE of the two ESA-provided recievers on. In other words, it wasn't a NASA screwup, but an ESA one! Oh, and it turns out that the data comms system based on those recievers wouldn't have worked at all because of a major major screw up by the ESA... and one determined engineer saved the friggin day on that one. Look for yourself: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeatur
Yeah, it deserves to be modded up
My car gets thirty rods to the hogs head and that's the way I likes it!
Yes, that's the obvious time to test it to make sure it works within the manufacturer-guarenteed range. But the best time to try to calibrate it to a much smaller, more accurate range is when it's in the situation where it's going to be used. (Or as close as you can get it, since we didn't have the luxury of calibrating them after they landed on Mars.)
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
That's a phrase I learned in fifth grade. I find it ironic that the likes of NASA doesn't know it. There's another one they didn't learn either: "Those who don't learn from their mistakes are bound to repeat them over and over until they finally do" Lose one shuttle? Did they learn? NO.. Lose TWO shuttles. Did they learn? We'll see.........
Once the data is adjusted for the correct calibration, the slight differences have been fixed. No need to cruxify Nasa again.
As stated in the article:
Squyres is "not embarrassed at all" about the slip-up with the rovers. "It was an easy mistake to make," he says. "It happened during some very busy and stressful times." He also says it is not fair to compare it to past mishaps because the spacecraft suffered no damage
If they're using Apache, we can now say with confidence it is the most popular web server in the solor system!
Bleh!
Gee, how many PHDs does it take.
I can just imagine the scene:
"Put that instrument it in the one on the left."
"Your left, or my left?"
"Whatever."
or does it look like the guys who brought us the Beagle Bungle want to 'blame' NASA for suceeding. And we are falling for it again? P.T. was right, there really is one born every minute.
In case you didn't notice this 'error' is less than the uncertanty of the instruments. This is a non-story.
If the NASA scientists couldn't find water in Death Valley this year, they couldn't find their own ass.
See what you really should have asked him, is "Pounds? How many burning Libraries of Congress is that?"
The correct order of steps: Build, test, install, test, calibrate, test.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
On the other hand, do you use ergs or joules? Or meters or centimeters in everything? Do you ever use arc-minutes or arc seconds, or do you use radians? For that matter, there's also milliradians.
And then of course there's those reasonable scientists who use Astonomical Units, light years and parsecs. Nice SI there.
Then there's the scientists that use Angstroms for the size of atoms or electromagnetic wavelengths. It's so helpful to have that extra factor of 10 thrown in there without an SI prefix.
My point is two-fold:
1) While English units are screwy, using SI or pseudo-SI-derivatives doesn't obviate the need to do conversions nor prevent the possibility of screwing up conversions.
2) Scientists also have a fetish for creating and using non-standard units and alternate systems. Gee, they're human too, just like engineers.
Myself, I just accepted long ago that in this world I need to be multi-unital so to speak, and have some gut understanding of meters, miles, feet, centimeters, inches, millimeters, calories, Calories, joules, newtons, and oh yes, those lovely slugs.
Admit it - the guys on the Mayflower used the wrong sort of cheese when calculating the standard weight of a pound.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It isn't a big deal. Instead of "Mars Rovers Have Incorrect Instruments Installed", a better headline would have been "Mars Rover Data Analyzed With Incorrect Calibration Data Files"
What are you, a PR professional? Blaming the error on using the wrong calibration file is an example of the Public Relations Spin monster that has this country by the throat. "ECONOMY CREATES 220,000 JOBS IN JANUARY!" shouts Fox News and the administration, and that sounds good - but they leave out that the economy *lost* 275,000 jobs in the same month. How to lie by telling the truth. I've seen Dick Cheney brag about how 2 million [entry-level] jobs were created in 2004, while leaving out that we *lost* 3 million high tech jobs. "FDA SAYS BEEF SUPPLY SAFE because Mad Cow Disease only found in brains and blood", but conveniently forgets that meat is infused with blood. FDA says ONLY ONE COW WITH MCD, but forgets to clarify that they only *found* one cow with MCD, hundreds of thousands were never even tested. "PFIZER SAYS STUDIES SHOW BEXTRA AND CELEBREX SAFE" while omitting results from two independent studies that show significant increase in heart attacks among Bextra/Celebrex users. These are just examples, but they illustrate that it is very easy to never utter a lie and still lie through the teeth. WRONG CALIBRATION FILES USED FOR ROVER DATA you say? - yeah, right, sure.
But back to the Rover mix-up: Why this particular mix-up is important is that this could have been ANY error, not one that was easily corrected. Any competent person would look at two identical looking instruments on the table with two identical looking rovers and think "I better not get these mixed up." What if they had installed the wrong guidance computers or the wrong antenna aiming software? I know those don't exist, but you get the point.
Can any of the NASA engineers tell me how many inches there are in a galon? I've heard that the conversion it's done using feet, and that also that one inche is about 2 oz. 4 pounds 1/2 mile, 3.1415 pints and a tea spoon not filled at all.. Can someone help me? I always get confused with this imperial units...