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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.
Twin Mars rovers, Opportunity and Spirit landed on the Moon.
RTFA. NASA's Mars rovers Opportunity and Spirit are identical twins It's the first goddamn line...
StrayByte.Net
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. :-)
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.
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.
Why is it hard to support them when they're in the middle of a hugely successful Mars mission?
No one outside the community even noticed this until recently, and in the end it really made no difference. So where's the beef?
Even though the designs of the rovers are identical, the instruments themselves are not. The article says so. Each instrument was calibrated to behave properly in one rover. When the instruments were swapped, the readings from them were incorrect.
StrayByte.Net
How can i possibly advocate for a mars mission when they can't even get this shit right?
How can I possibly listen to you when you cant even used the shift key properly.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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?
It's impossible with current technology to build such an instrument exactly the same. It's only after building that you can calibrate them and get accurate readings from them.
"How can I possibly listen to you when you cant even used the shift key properly."
If you had enough intelligence to use the apostrophe key in the word can't maybe your opinion would have merit.
Those in glass houses......
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!"
one word: Tolerances.
when you have 100 resistors at 0.5% tolerance, you are gonna have drift, and you will have to calibrate them to the right parts, you can make 100's of those cars of the same make and model, but none will be exactly the same, especially when you have sensitive equipment. (Think odometer)
>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.
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.
Damn your Dumb! Read before posting dumb things. No two things are exactly the same even if designed as such. And yes you can get in two identical cars and one will perform different.
It's a calibration, the whole concept is no two things are the same. Any piece of instrumentation needs to be calibrated and that calibration is set for that device. No manufacturing can produce 2 identical things, just not possible since the two items could not share the same time and space in the universe together thus both are going to be slightly different.
Anytime you get a piece of gear, you get it setup, then you take some means of calibrating it and test it with something that has deemed to be as accurate as possible. Maybe some source such as a rock. But basically anything that will provide a common test basis for the device.
So say you are measuring temperatures on something in a lab. You set up a big system for collecting data off a bunch of thermocouples. Each one has it's own channel through it's own voltage modules and thermocouples and so forth. So you take a calibrator and have it feed a signal through the system to mimic a thermocouple. you get a calibration curve for a channel, then you go to the next channel with the same device and do the same for the next channel, this will be a different calibration. and then you work through them all. I have system set up with 16 channels at work and all use the same parts, but there is about 4 closely similar calibrations across the channels, but no two channels follow the same calibration.
NASA did the same, they built the devices, then calibrated them with the same rocks, and developed a calibration curve for each system, and that was to be kept with each rover, they swapped the instruments, so now they switch the calibrations and everything is fine.
This all goes back to simple accuracy and how close you can get things, but bottom line no two things are the same. Look at computers, you can have 100 computers, exactly the same built right in a row, with the exact same software and so forth. Turn them on and let the run under exact same conditions, some will have hardware failures, some will have software get wacky on them and so forth. It's just the way it works.
RTFA. NASA swapped the instruments inadvertently but since both the rovers and the detectors are manufactured identically the only consequence was that we were using the calibration data file from one instrument to analyze the data coming from the other. Swap the calibration files so they are coupled to the correct instruments again, reanalyze the raw data, and the problem is solved without having to privatize NASA.
How can i possibly advocate for a mars mission when they can't even get this shit right?
The Mars mission is stupid but not for the reason you give.
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.
No manufacturing can produce 2 identical things, just not possible since the two items could not share the same time and space in the universe together thus both are going to be slightly different.
Oh, come on! It's easy!
ln rover_1 rover_2
See?
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...
Actually since "Mars Rovers" is a plural subject, the plural verb "have" must be used instead of the singular verb "has".
Right, a Post-It. On a spacecraft to Mars? These are highly sensitive one of a kind instruments. You don't just go sticking paper and glue all over it.
Post-Its are not static dissipative. You could have a static discharge damage components and you wouldn't even know until the rover had landed on Mars. You could accidently leave a Post-It on the spacecraft and cause damage. How do you know residue from the glue on the Post-It won't cause damage? Now you have to test for that. It is amazing how one stupid thing like a Post-It note could add more complexity and make things even worse.
Now what would have been smart is to have devices like this keyed so that they can't possible be installed in the wrong place. But that tends to add complexity to the design and when you are only building a handful of rovers in highly controlled conditions, it can be hard to justify.
What is stupid is that there is no investigation of what happened. Sure, in this case the mixup was relatively harmless, but the next one might not be. NASA needs to be more proactive and not wait until things blow up to have an investigation. I don't expect perfection, but they at least have to understand their flaws.
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!
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.
Damn your Dumb!
'Nuff said.
...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
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.
NASA is no longer the lightfooted space arm of the United States Federal Government. Hasn't been since the last Apollo mission came home. It has become just as hidebound and moribund as any other major government bureaucracy, and as unwilling to accept criticism.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
OK, so Post-Its are out. (I suspect they were being suggested facetiously.) Does that really exhaust the ingenuity of the space program? How about keeping them in separate boxes and making sure only one was ever out at any given time?
The point is, these researchers knew that the spectrometers were measurably different -- that's why they had to be calibrated at all. They knew that it was important that spectrometer A went in probe A and not in probe B. Yet they somehow made a bone-headed mistake that wouldn't be acceptable of a first year grad student.
Look, these rovers have been tremendously successful. It's a wonderful mission and JPL has done, as usual, a great job. That doesn't make this any less of a screw-up. And just because you dodged a bullet, doesn't mean the gun wasn't fired.
This was sloppy and they got lucky.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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.
Pathfinder took a lot of budget shortcuts because it was considered an experimental mission to test rover and airbag concepts. Thus, it may not be the Germans fault.
Table-ized A.I.
...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.
Yes, but only if you buy them at OfficeMax. However anyone working in electronic industry can tell you that there are hundreds of types of antistatic labels, tapes, bags and markers that are designed to conduct current. This is a non-problem. Besides, most of the instrument is likely to be a flat, smooth metal, and you can stick anything you want to it.
In fact, compliance with basic ISO 9000 (9002, for one) requirements simply mandates that every single part is marked to death and when it travels from one bench to another it has to be accompanied by a product identification tag which should make it obvious what the part is and where it gets installed.
In other words, as many people suggested, this is a mistake that could have been serious. If you accidentally discharge a firearm and almost kill someone it is a big deal even if nobody was hurt. Same thing here. They could have swapped power supplies, for example, and burned out the instruments because of some subtle differences between the two.
[..]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.
If you had enough intelligence to use quotation marks around "can't," maybe your opinion would have merit. Don't forget that comma either. And just for your information, ellipses require four periods in that context, not seven.
After all, I am strangely colored.
... 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.
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!
Damn your Dumb
"you're".
you get it setup
"set up". ("setup" is a noun.)
something that has deemed to be
"has been deemed".
Each one has it's own channel through it's own voltage modules
"its" (both places).
but there is about 4 closely similar calibrations
"there are about".
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.
because cheap labour republicans see every dollar spent by the ANY program as a tax cut the wealthy arent getting. It never ceases to amaze me how people can support the party thats cutting their throat over gay marriage and abortion and "morals"
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
...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.
Damn your Dumb!
Damn you're Dumb!
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
Uh, I think that's what the AC was pointing out...
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Nobody duplicated the experiments to confirm the results?
I've been meaning to pick up a spectrometer and test Mars myself...
... the less they're worth.
Words to men, as air to birds.
More realistically, failure-wise, one of the rovers might have crashed, and thus they'd never have realized the other was calibrated with the wrong data, because the only way they noticed was they were getting different readings for things that should be the same.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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).
but there is about 4 closely similar calibrations
Also, a single digit number should be spelled out: four, not 4
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
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
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
The germans who built it, didn't calibrate it, because the americans who ordered it, didn't include calibration in the requirements.
Faster, better, cheaper, pick two. for pathfinder, they chose faster and cheaper, and it worked well. they could have opted for calibration, but, that would have meant 'better' at the expense of 'faster and cheaper'.
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.
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.
... 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.
It seems to me the history of NASA is littered with mistakes like this, some of higher magnitude, some of lesser. Maybe I've seen Apollo 13 one too many times, but IMO the startling thing about NASA is NOT the number of mistakes they make, but the amazingly high percentage of those mistakes which are worked-around, or at least contained. Sure, redunancy is a simple enough concept to follow, and can account for some of the obstacles they've overcome. But how many Man-All-Nighters have been used by NASA over the years to fix problems both life-threatening and otherwise?
How they react to mistakes is as important as the mistakes they make. NASA, as an organization, has consistantly proven that if a solution can be found, they will find it--so attacking them on their responses to crises is difficult. Do they make too many mistakes? Maybe. But what organizations can you compare it with? How can we be sure that these kinds of mistakes aren't just indicative of the scope and complexity of their projects?
NASA is chock full of really smart people. That's kind of the point. There are bureaucrats, and sycophants, and, yes, idiots, too; but these guys are the absolute best at what they do. If NASA is stupid, what does that say about the rest of us?
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."
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?
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)
Punctuation in English is enclosed within the quote marks, but in technical matters it often can't be when the quote marks enclose a precise character string the meaning of which would be altered by inclusion of punctuation necessary for the larger sentence structure.
For example, if followed precisely, this won't work:
while this will work:
Look at the bright side: there's always seppuku.
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...