Slashdot Mirror
Japanese 'Minerva' Robot Lost in Space
space_weasel writes "A little Japanese robot that was supposed to land on the surface of an asteroid has accidentally been flung into space by its mothership. New Scientist Space reports that the accident occurred as the data link with the spacecraft was being switched from an station in Japan to one in Australia. Mission controllers still plan to punch a hole in the asteroid and collect samples, which will be returned to Earth."
Dammit, they can't even handoff mission control without losing the probe, and they still think it's OK to go around punching holes in ancient celestial objects? What if they miss?
--
make install -not war
Perhaps, but someone failed it when it came to the hazard analysis on that spacecraft...
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
wonder if it might still be able to land on a few chairs thrown from Redmond some days ago.
How do you say "Blame Dr. Smith" in Japanese?
Must have been a bug-eyed anime probe that made a high pitched squealing sound as it was "flung off into space" by the mothership...
...is, after roaming the galaxy for 200 years collecting information, it will come back to Earth to destroy us.
Dark Reflection
robot 1 : target acquired, beginning landing sequence...
robot 2 : roger that, beginning land... OH LOOK A STAR!
[all robots turn towards the star]
robot 3 : OOHHHHHHHHHHH PRETTY!!!!
'Still, he admits that mission controllers do not fully understand how to deal with the spacecraft's motion after the periodic thruster firings' Then why are they mission controllers????
I wonder how, exactly, the software being used had the capability to allow this to happen. Even if the problem were procedural, I would think that, on transfer of control, you would lock down all non-essential functions - like "flinging" payloads into space - until control has been successfully handed off.
Of course, this is all pointless conjecture on my part - it may have been a hardware malfunction, for all I know. It would be interesting to analyze things like these. Having only a few years real-world experience, I doubt my programming skills would be worth a damn, but I would be thrilled just to have the opportunity to read the code they use before hand. Generally I don't volunteer my time to OSS-like programs, but this is one situation where I could easily see myself helping. Or trying to help, more like it.
Then again, by releasing it beforehand open source, someone else may very well be able to analyze the code and "steal" control of the probe/satellite/whatever-is-using-the-software, possibly using it for nefarious gain, or possibly just being a bunch of dicks. So this probably wouldn't pan out. Still, a nerd can dream.
If Star Trek has taught us nothing else, it is that probes lost in space are a bad thing. And the fact that it's Japanese means that it's definitely going to come back and go apeshit.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
When working with the USA, spacecraft get lost due to forgetting to switch between metric and common units.
When working with Australia, spacecraft get lost due to forgetting that their maps of the universe are up-side-down.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Exonature is as cruel as mothernature herself. Obviously, the mothership began to ovulate, and, sensing a potential mate nearby, cruelly cast off her young to fend for itself.
"Game over space cadet"
During this 40-minute antenna change, information about the spacecraft's vertical motion was unavailable to ground controllers.
For a country which prides itself as being at the forefront of robotics technology, this is rather surprising. The latency inherent in space communication over great distances is the primary reason for using intelligent robots in space. If the probe was sufficiently intelligent, it would perform its tasks without supervision from ground control. I hope they (including NASA and the ESA) put a lot more effort into automating their space probes in the future.
The probe was named Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom and skill. The mothership is named Hayabusa, after the world's fastest flying bird.
Unfortunately, the mission controller was named Bob, after the Roman god of lazy eyes and uncoordinated pitching.
This was a series of truly bad rolls of the dice. Two of their three stablizers failed, they had bad altimeter data because "the slope of the asteroid's surface had apparently caused the altimeter to misjudge... estimates of the craft's altitude," and then they got below 100 meters while the antenna switchover was happening. They sent the separate command without realizing the thrusters to maintain minimum altitude had just fired, because of that break in communications. So the article says, though it's not a sterling example of great science writing, I'll give you that.
The "mission officials are saying "Our readiness was not so complete," to their credit, but it's not like they're complete incompetents. More like they're pushing the technology: the altimeter hadn't ever been used before, for the obvious example.
Sort of fits the cheaper/faster model of robotic exploration. You have your hits and your misses. This isn't a Cassini Cadillac of a probe.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Hmm. Japanese space robot goes bananas, attacks other Japanese space robot, hurls it off into deep space... I've seen that before somewhere.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Mork : "Fly, be free!" [SPLAT]
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
You'd sure know more if you went to the (somewhat unclear) article, which would obviate the need for lots of your conjecture.
The main probe has been going on one of its three "stablizing wheels," the other two having failed. There's a sidebar link in the article to an earlier one about those failures. Mission controllers have been burning extra fuel keeping the thing at the right distance from the asteroid, facing the asteroid, and with its solar panels facing the sun; they already had that against them. Then the altimeter data they were getting was bad, they were closer than they thought, because some combination of the laser altimeter (previously untested) and the slope of the asteroid's surface confused the data.
They realized they were within 100 meters and had to send the detach command while the antenna switch was happening. The blackout prevented them from realizing a "keep above minimum altitude" engine thrust had just gone off.
This is much more of a reflection of this model of probe: it's cheaper, it's faster to develop, and there are going to be failures like the Beagle and this.
(Personally I do think there'd be a big gain if, before and after missions like this, the code got reviewed. I doubt very much that hackers in Idaho would have foreseen the failed stabilizers, the workaround, the potential for misjudging the altimeter data, and the combination of the blackout and the necessity for the release command. But in terms of intellectual freedom, it'd be a nice statement, and the Post Mortems would sure feature a lot of people asking Feynman-esque questions about icewater and O-rings.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I told you not to pinch your mother there!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Someone set up them the bomb.
Is there some reason why we can't make these things tougher or more redundant?
A-Bomb
As a politician instead of a scientist, the first thing that came to mind when I read this story were the faces of the people who made the budget for that robot. They just heard that their spacecraft flung a $20million bag of money into the great unknown. I imagine that feels just about the same as getting kicked square in the nuts.
I am and always will be a stereotype, because who in their right mind prefers mono?
Ffffuuuukkkkooooovvvvvv!!!!!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Go fetch, boy! Go fetch the little robot!
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Here you can see Minerva (and it's cover) saying "so long and thanks for all the batteries" (In japanese, of course). Also there are pictures of Hayabusa taken from Minerva (first 2)
So, will people start trying to remotely install Linux on it?
If I have an inch standard, I can go fairly easily down to an accurate 1/32 or even 1/64 of an inch. Without a ruler with accurately scribed gradations, can you measure me 0.396875 cm?
Please tell me you're not being serious there. Do you honestly believe that centimetres can't be halved recursively too? Or, a more realistic solution, a metric person can pull an ordinary plastic ruler out of their desk drawer, and mark off 4mm (all metric rulers are marked with mm, some even half or quarter mm, except perhaps children's rulers).
If you really need a measurement more accurate than a millimetre (about a 25th of an inch), you should probably be using a more accurate tool.
So you're example was meant to point out that 10/64ths of an inch is harder to do in metric than imperial. Surely most people find it considerably easier to manipulate base-10 numbers (even the Americans do that with their money), then round to mm than manipulate fractions with differing denominators (albeit normally powers of 2), then work out how many 16ths, 32nds, and 64ths they need. And if you want to use a calculator, you end up with decimal anyway, or a denominator determined by the calculation (which may not even be a power of 2).
"I want 8 lengths of 1 and 3/16th inches, plus 3 lengths of 2 and 13/64th inches, then divide the whole lot by 3".
Other than inches in feet, what else in the imperial system uses 12? There are 16 ounces in an inch, three feet in a yard, 8 furlongs in a mile, 14 pounds in a stone, 8 stone in a hundredweight. I'm not seeing many 12s there.
12 is a number that can be divided by 2, 3, 4, and their multiples very easily, and still end up in integer units again without equipment. The decimal metric system gets icky when you try to divide anything by anything except 5 and 2.
You can't divide 12 by 5 and get a whole number either. You can divice by four just as easily in metric as you can in imperial. For example, 8 cm divided by 4 = 2 cm. Whereas 6 inches divided by four goes into decimal places. Luckily most measuring units have decimal places so it's a non issue.
Maybe you live in some world where you often need to work out what a third or a quarter of a foot is without using any measuring instruments that show anything smaller than an inch. Maybe you need a new ruler.