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Spacecraft Crashes Into Satellite
Juha-Matti Laurio writes "A robotic NASA spacecraft designed to rendezvous with an orbiting satellite instead crashed into its target. Unbeknownst to engineers at the time, DART's main sensor mistakenly believed it was flying away from the satellite when it was actually moving 5 feet per second toward it, investigators found."
So that's where the minus sign should have gone, I knew I dropped it somewhere!
..., these figures can't be right!`
and an Obligatory Pratchett Quote:
Hex's pen was scratching across the paper.
Ponder glanced at the figures.
`
Ridcully grinned again. `You mean either the whole world has gone wrong or your machine is wrong?`
`Yes!`
`Then I'd imagine the answer is pretty easy, wouldn't you?` said Ridcully.
`Yes, it certainly is. Hex gets thoroughly tested every day` said Ponder Stibbons
`Good point, that man,` Said Ridcully.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Well, we answered that question. Mission accomplished!
Legalize recreational marijuana. Seriously.
forgot to carry that negative sign again
it's a successfull hit, now let's build that missile defense system.
Well... Maybe they shouldn't have painted a giant bullseye on the side of the satellite.
DART: 50 points
NASA: -110 million dollars
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today." -Isaac Asimov
"Investigators blamed the collision on faulty navigational data that caused the DART spacecraft to believe that it was backing away from its target when it was actually bearing down on it."
The lesson learned? Don't hire Microsoft to program your space endeavors.
The RIAA watches while you sleep.
No, but seriously, this is sad. It takes us farther away from what I'd like to see in a car, namely a self-steering one. I'd prefer one that detects an oncoming truck as oncoming and tries to get out of the way.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
From Challenger:
"Engineers at Morton Thiokol (manufacturer of the solid rocket boosters) knew that the temperatures were outside of the design range of the O-rings. They strongly objected to the launch, but were overruled by senior Thiokol management."
From Columbia:
"In a risk-management scenario similar to the Challenger disaster, NASA management failed to recognize the relevance of engineering concerns for safety. Two examples of this were failure to honor engineer requests for imaging to inspect possible damage, and failure to respond to engineer requests about status of astronaut inspection of the left wing."
From DART:
"Investigators also raised issues with the mission's management style, saying that lack of training and experience caused the DART design team to shun expert advice. They also found that internal checks and balances were inadequate in uncovering the mission's shortcomings."
Is this a Anti-Sat Weapon Test?
~AC
this rendezvous was a sort of "blind date".
Way to go NASA!
Nobody liked that satellite anyway.
Not hampered by engineering degree, can tell difference between "toward" and "away from" - will work for same 6 figure salary previous position holder was receiving...
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
Yet again NASA prove that they should no longer be in charge of the western worlds space exploration. This is another example of why the private sector should be allowed prosper with it's own plans and designs. As the X-prize has shown, NASA is a dinosaur and should either be put down or evolve by embrace privately funded initiatives.
-Jar.
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
Offical NASA writeup available here: http://patriot.net/~cary/slashdot/dart_mishap.html
e rview.pdf
Made from original PDF available here: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/148072main_DART_mishap_ov
(I hate PDF's for simple text things like this)
--
NoFluffNews.com - Currently in development but seeking journalists and editors
DART's main sensor mistakenly believed it was flying away from the satellite when it was actually moving 5 feet per second toward it, investigators found.
Yeah, but did it find Sarah Connor?
Push Button, Receive Bacon
... they should not have ignored those "compare of signed with unsigned" warnings ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
How crushed would you feel watching all that happen from so far away, and being utterly helpless?
It's bad enough with regular software, but someone somewhere is having a huge Homer "DOH!" moment..
I feel for ya..
It is actually Google's plan to kill Dilbert.
It was called DART. The NASA page has headlines like "DARTing Into Space" and "DART Seeks its Target: NASA launches a DART to target an orbiting bull's-eye". The DART has hit its target now, what's the problem? ;-)
Also, DART stands for "Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology"; I'd say it hasn't been a particularly good demonstration now, has it? (Reminds me of the Windows 98 launch (or oh, the recent CES as well).)
And notice from the article that this incident actually happened last year!
The satellite crashes into you!
In a subsequent news conference, DART claimed it did not remember hitting on the target after being spaced out on AMBIEN, a method it used to help it sleep(500s) before its launch from Kennedy Space Center. DART claimed that it got several bytes to eat before drinking a cup of Java and collecting its garbage. Upon introspection DART agreed that, despite its name, hitting on the target showed little Class despite the size of its Package.
...NASA has finally set aside a portion of its budget for the hiring of a trombone player to lighten the mood after each disasterous miscalculation with a well-timed "waaah WAAAAAAAAH."
This is space man, where up is down and inches are metric. You just know it'll end in tears.
Task Mangler
I support NASA, but they have had a run of stupid mistakes lately. For example the whole meters to feet conversion problem. Yes everyone makes mistakes, I know, but NASA is supposed to be the best and the brightest. You would think that when dealing with such expensive equiptment they woulod check and re-check, and even methemtically prove the correctness of their programs. Sloppy programming from me or you on some spreadsheet app is bad, but not unexpected, but I have higher standards for NASA.
Philosophy.
I know it is fashionable to highlight the usual NASA-related budget cuts but a quote from TFA This to me sounds like an underfunded team rushing to meet deadlines. Or were they just simply unlucky/inept?
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Oops! I took down email servers down on three contintents due to a DNS error back in the day. Oops! For the curious it was a contract job for for a division of a large Japanese company, and there was some confusion on resposibilities for the DNS servers However, they like real apologies when someone screws up. They were actually planning to have me go on a corporate jet to Japan to apologize profusely to the company CEO. My boss told them to go do something very difficult to themselves. American arrogance at its best!
Are you sure? Is that 5 feet per second or 5 metres per second?
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Queue the obligatory unit conversion jokes.
Being an ignorant Imperialist on this subject, I have to ask: are SI units in the opposite direction? I mean, when you convert from feet to meters, does it switch directions?
Or does, like, SI seconds = negative Imperial seconds?
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
...where was Bruce??
This is where we come in! :-)
[Nobody mention Beagle...]
DART Seeks its Target
NASA launches a DART to target an orbiting bull's-eye.
Given the objective, I don't see the problem here. Way to go, guys!
That after having pushed the orbiting satellite at 5 feet per second,
investigators found that the robotic shover space probe is heading toward earth to protect your grandmother from the Terrible Secret of Space.
Last message recieved from the robotic space probe was :
" Please go stand by the stairs, so I can protect you... "
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Same thing happened to me and the garage door when I was 14 years old backing my dad's Buick out of the driveway.
He didn't let me drive it again until I was 18.
As long as scientists and engineers are cogs in an organizational structure in which management tells them what to do, they will often produce crap, no matter how many PhDs there are in their midst. This is the case even when those managers were once brilliant technical engineers and scientists, because perceptions and priorities change when you switch into a management role.
This little episode was just another in a long line of screwups, and it won't be the last under current organizational models. Doing technical things can't be done properly unless insightful scientists and engineers are free of constraints on their insight, allowed to bypass the directional controls that management so loves, uninhibited from pointing our core problems in fear of their careers, and totally unshackled from the demands of time management.
Yes, I know that most managers would call this "anarchy", but therein lies the problem: by eliminating that alleged anarchy, you are also sacrificing the best that people can offer, just to make your life easier. Well, perhaps it's stating the blindingly obvious, but making management's life easy is not central to exploring the stars.
NASA's problem is the same one that permeates all technical industries, but in NASA's case the mishaps are just very public. I don't expect anything to change, but there is no doubting what the general problem is.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Oh - it's meant to be less than zero.
That's worth 50 points in DART!
This reminds me of another "infamous" incident where some parts of the spacecraft (I think it were speed/distance sensors) mixed-up imperial and metric units... Poor coordination between the design teams anyone?
Someone please MOD parent up 10000 points.
We've got a history established where people taught -> new math -> students who taught -> new math -> students ->
Launch an astronaut (no monkeys or dogs), watch soomething happen, splashdown. It sounds like waste, but when someone's life is at stake, it seems to force them to keep their eye on the ballgame (not just the ball). Otherwise, they try to maneuver hardware as though it's a mechanical erector set-based gaming system shown at E3 with no consequences...they can just hit the [reset] button when they smurf up (aka "give us some more money so we can practice some more"). When it's just hardware, success amounts to lots of geeks & nerds jumping up & down, toastinig with double-strength kool-aid, then taking turns to run to the bathroom to stroke off. Besides, there are lots of people looking to hit space, and there'd be no dearth of volunteers to keep NA$A honest. When there's a risk (which there wasn't in this case), they'll be careful (not more careful). Think of it as akin to packing your own parachute. If you have something at stake, really at stake, you tend to be a bit more paranoid about your work.
"A robotic NASA spacecraft designed to rendezvous with an orbiting satellite instead crashed into its target."
NASA was able to extract the satellite that was deeply embedded into the ship's hull using the M.A.N.O.S. manipulator system. The extraction appeared successful until the M.A.N.O.S. manipulators let the satellite go free. In a Bugs Bunny'esque fashion, the satellite hovered for a moment before it suddenly plummeted into the Earth's atmosphere. NASA wouldn't reveal any details about which satellite had burned up in the atmosphere, but insiders have hinted that it was a powerful telescope.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
From the Feynman report:
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
To summarize a satelite targeting robot called DART designed to intercept satelites, launched from Vandenberg Air Force base (un?)successfully knocket out the satelite it was targetting, and they wont release the investigative report because of international traffic in arms regulations. Hmm, sounds like a good result for the star wars weapons team.
Unless there was only one variable at fault, the odds of a collision in space would be (for lack of a better pun) astronomical. So while they might have wasted money, at the end of the day the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack collision is well worth bragging about.
... that the project name for the orbiting satellite was Balanced Orbit Autonomous Rondezvous Drone.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
This all happened on April 15 2005. A better write-up here: http://www.space.com/news/060516_dart_mishap_updat e.html. And here's the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DART_(spacecraft)
The satellite it crashed into was defunct. From Wikipedia: "The goal was to develop and demonstrate an automated navigation and rendezvous capability in a NASA spacecraft. Currently, only the Russian Space Agency and JAXA have autonomous space craft navigation.".
Interesting snippet: "NASA has said the official 70-page report will not be publicly released because it contains sensitive material protected by International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR)".
This was planned as a "high-risk*, low-budget" mission and I'm sure they learned a lot. (* I suppose high-risk in terms of likelihood of meeting up with the target, not of collateral damage.)
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=2060
Some gems:
Ah, only the best and brightest in software engineering for our tax dollars...
- jonathan.
Taking a look at list of bugs for space exploration and particuallry things like Mars Climate Orbiter I wonder how NASA could make so many mistakes in their software. It seems that no mission actually goes as planned without a computer glitch that is mission-threatning.
... and the likes of. Or someone forgetting the metric conversion, I mean, hello, that should be checked! The software should have run first inside a simulator run! Only then should it be deployed onto the device.
In contrast to, for example, the Shuttle, which has had only a few computer failures, and none of them fatal, it's hard for me to understand why they pay so little attention to testing these systems. I mean, maybe there are no lives at stake, but that doesn't give them the right to forget about testing it and probably letting some junior programmer write the algorithm. Then we get stupidities like:
String s = new String("");
if(a == "some text comparison")
"The inaccurate perception of its distance and speed ... prevented DART from taking effective action to avoid a collision," the summary said.
Next time, DUCK!!!1!
DART: "Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology"
---
ARROW: "Automated Ruination of Rather Old Warbird"
JAVELIN: "Just Another Very Expensive Lesson In Navigation"
BULLET: "Bravado is an Unfortunate Liability, Limiting Effective Targeting"
--- We are not in the 8th dimension. We are over New Jersey.
This is actually year old happening. News is that Nasa finally made public report about it.
Always wondered what happened to the original batch. perhaps now we know ....
Low-budget
Assembly
Without
Navigaion...
Glad to see the Hekawi tribe has entered the space age.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Bull's Eye!
How is DART different from Progress (the Soyus based supply ship)? I thought Progress carried out automated docking to the ISS?
With no structure, they would never convince congress to give them any money. It's good when unstructured research happens, but structured, result-oriented research is always going to be ablt to get more funding.
NASA is clearly poorly managed, but it seems to me that the solution is good management, not no management at all. Of course, I have no idea how to actually implement good management.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
a) It had a crush ...?
b) It shouted "stop", but sound doesnt travel in space
c)
But since it was a $110 million project anyway, couldn't the software have been tested in simulation first?
I understand the article says:
"Unbeknownst to engineers at the time, DART's main sensor mistakenly believed it was flying away from the satellite when it was actually moving 5 feet per second toward it, investigators found."
1. Is this just sloppy writing blaming a piece of hardware for a software problem?
2. If the sensor contained significant logic, would it have been that hard to test whether it correctly registered retreat and advancement?
3. Or an interface screwup between the main program and the sensor logic like confusing yards and meters? (And no test of the complete system?)
In any case it might well demonstrate the results when you shoot something up and see what happens without development adequate to the complexity.
So I guess its Google's fault. Curse the place!
The satellite was actually shot by a CIA agent standing on a grassy knoll.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
man - someone's insurance premiums are going to be scary after paying for this fender bender!
The likelihood of producing useful engineering, I've found, tends to act on a bell curve with engineers. Those with high school educations only don't do very well, and those with PhDs don't do very well. Oh, sure, there are exceptions - I've known some crackerjack folks without advanced degrees, and I've known some engineers who have PhDs that can get their heads into the real world. But, by and large, I'd take a mix of BS and MS folks with lots of hands on experience over a team of PhDs any day.
Oh, I should also mention - the value of an advanced degree increases with the number of years of practical work between degrees. If you graduate with a PhD, you'd better plan on doing pure research somewhere, cause you'll be worse than a BS freshout the day you step on the job.
The report was just released, how long ago did the crash occur? Also, think we could use this technique to get the ISS back into a higher orbit?
the trrrists did it!. the al-quaida I say! Now gimme me some funds!!! we need to put some lasers to bust these trrrsts spacecraft i say! The war against terrorits has begun. You are either with us or in out in space.
Please pass the bong. Thanks.
Ack, i can only say that my experience with robotics tells me that it's hopeless to trust just one sensor, when dealing with a robot.
I far too well remember spending countless of hours before realizing, that when i got too close, or too far away, the sensor would start reporting its result wrongly; it couldn't tell the difference between 2 cm, 30 cm, and 4 m. creating a function to help it realize what it had done, based on previous measurements helped, but was still a bad solution. getting extra sensors, that had different range problems solved it. The point being, ARRRR ROBOTS! don't trust anything they tell you, and don't trust their programming, especially if you coded it yourself. That being said, working with robots is fun, and if you haven't tried it, you should.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
Anyway, on a big scary program, here's how these sorts of problems are spotted :
Step #3 is about as important as step #1, because you absolutely cannot fix every problem. There's neither the time, nor the money.
Something else to keep in mind : if I spotted a problem that would surely doom my project, and can't get engineering leadership/management to agree with me, I should share some of the blame.
And yes, I had the box checked so it would be considered for posting.
It's a curse being ahead of the curve.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
More like nudged.
5 (feet per second) = 3.4 miles per hour
NASA mission control say they now regret ordering the craft to extend its robotic arms over its sensors and turn in complete circles 3 times.
If you think Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed are merely private contractors, you've not been paying attention. They are as integrated into the current system as they can be while still retaining the title of "corporation". This is part of what Eisenhower was warning us about - when the private sector controls and influences the public sector in an industry, they become intermingled in ways that do not inspire greatness. And it becomes dangerous for the autonomy of the state from private control.
NASA, while purportedly a civilian agency, is obviously tremendously influenced by not only the military but also those private contractors. It's pretty amazing that Scaled Composited was able to even get a bid in on the recent manned capsule designs - and they almost didn't. Notice that their proposal wasn't accepted, though. Whether it wasn't as good (doubtful) or whether there are other barriers to entry (probable) is up for debate.
***
I guess the name fits.
In DART's case, the MIB determined that the first cause for its premature retirement occurred when the estimated and measured positions differed to such a degree that the software executed a computational "reset." By design, this reset caused DART to discard its estimated position and speed and restart those estimates using measurements from the primary GPS receiver.
Careful examination of the software code revealed that upon reset, the velocity measurement from the primary GPS receiver was introduced back into the software's calculations of the spacecraft's estimated position and speed. If the measured velocity had been sufficiently accurate, the calculations would have converged and resulted in correct navigational solutions. However, DART's primary GPS receiver consistently produced a measured velocity that was offset or "biased" about 0.6 meters per second from what it should have been. This had the unfortunate effect of causing the calculations, which were being performed autonomously, to once again diverge until the difference became unacceptable to the pre-programmed computer logic. Once the limit as to how much the calculations could differ was reached, the software executed another reset. As a result, this cycle of diverging calculations followed by a software reset occurred about once every three minutes throughout the mission. These continual resets caused the incorrect navigational data that prompted excessive thruster firings and the higher than expected fuel usage.
Too many pre-programmed resets to the wrong data. Oops. I guess one small thing can cause a whole mission to fail! If you read the report though the rest of the mission was pretty succesful. You would have though they would build in some sort of fail safe ground control method though when there's millions of dollars worth of equipment at stake?
Anybody else notice that it was only moving 3.4mph (5.5km/h).
That doesn't sound very fast to me.
I'll admit I don't know how space craft are built,
but I wouldn't think that would do terrible damage.
Or am I missing something?
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!
"Well, it looked good in the prints and the computer sim went flawless.." Strange how things get lost in translation.
Doing technical things can't be done properly unless insightful scientists and engineers are free of constraints on their insight, allowed to bypass the directional controls that management so loves, uninhibited from pointing our core problems in fear of their careers, and totally unshackled from the demands of time management.
Right, because management by committee and fistfight works so much better. We're not talking about one-man research projects, here. We're talking about things that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and require thousands of people to execute. Do you really know enough brilliant engineers that will all work together on Mars-sized projects while "totally unshackled from the demands of time management" to create anything on a schedule that will actually line up with unforgiving orbital mechanics?
These projects have to be designed and built in a (typical) evironment where people die, get married, get sick, and otherwise come and go from projects. Which Alpha Nerd are you going to point to in order to keep things moving along? How will you actually demonstrate any sort of accountability to the citizens that actually PAY for this stuff if there's no management to string up? Do you really mean that you'd rather the brilliant engineers lose their jobs when something flames out? Because it is going to happen, whether an engineer manages the project or a manager manages the project. It's for sure going to happen if no one manages the project. On the other hand, unshackling people from any time management constraints will actually ensure that nothing ever gets done, so at least that way nothing will ever crash and burn... except for what's left of public support for the space program.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
This was on the AP wire on Monday. I understand that Slashdot isn't a "late breaking news" oriented site but ... this story is stale, anybody who'd be interested in it has most likely already heard about it. But, since I don't really understand the criteria for when and what stories are selected for linking on Slashdot, I can't really give any constructive feedback on how to improve the process. So I'm just going to bitch about it.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
when you ignore that little message "Objects in rear-view mirror are closer than they appear".
Guess they hired this guy:
(source)
There are a lot of posts concerning NASA, management, the Military-Industrial complex. As someone who has watched the decay of spacecraft operations, I can confidently tell you that much of it has to do with contracting and paychecks.
Quick review: Spacecraft programs contain a number of stages, e.g. design, integration and test, launch, etc. The last stage is Operations. There used to be a day when all stages were properly funded and for Operations, this meant 24/7 console staffing, dynamic simulators, on-site engineers, spacecraft design manuals and lots of legitimate training.
But here's the problem. Prior to the mid 90s, NASA and other agencies used cost plus contracting, and the big contractors settled into a mode where the initial mission budget would be exhausted by about launch minus 1 or 2 years. This is when they would run back to the government organization and ask for more money and after some hand-wringing more money was allocated. Then all of a sudden - poof it's gone. Fixed cost contracting had arrived.
The problem, the big gorilla contractors only know one way to build a spacecraft and as no one likes to change, both contractors and NASA started coming up with inventive ways to defund Operation so they come in close to budget. Buzz-words like "automation" and "lights out operations" reduced console staffing to only the day shift. On-site engineers are never hired - instead "factory" design engineers are dug up IF there is a problem. Without on-site engineering, there's no need for good spacraft docs and simulators and no one to construct legitimate practice exercises. Combine this with upper management's desire to meet schedule, the already rounded corners are shaved even more.
Once formal Operations had evaporated, launch and early orbit was solely in the hands of design engineers, who are not Operations engineers. There's a different mindset between the two. There used to be a day when operation screw ups could be avoided and design flaws caught in advance through legitimate simulation, but that's gone now. Why? NO ONE PAYS FOR IT ANYMORE!
Or as certain members of today's youth would put it: OMG!!!1 LOL @ team kill!!
(It's a sad world)
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Pity the story didn't come out yesterday:
b ert-20060517.html
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dil
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
In Swedish the word 'mot' (pronounced like english moot) means both towards and against. Therefore our government never has to lie when they send soldiers to other countries. However criminal, their actions is always 'mot' peace.
"And then the thing, with the sensors, and the oops, and the failing, and the crashing, and the CRYYYY-INNGGG!"
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
Yeesh, what a joke. I don't think I'd put my life in these idiots' hands willingly.
...most engineers DON'T make 6-figure salaries ...
Sure they do... It's just that the first few figures are zeros.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I disagree categorically with the perception that leaving technical people unfettered by management or time pressure will result in better designs, products or concepts. After RTFA, one notes that one reason provided for the failure is that the teams disregarded expert input - a characteristic that I have witnessed time and again within groups of bright technical people. Call it an adjunct of NIH - not invented here.
Another example is the cowboy coder, writing without specifications or testing. For some development methodologies, this may be an efficient way to rapidly prototype a UI or system, but for the most part it generates sh*t for quality. But, it's fun.
Every technical person would love to work in a Xerox- or Bell Labs-style environment of pure research with a virtually unlimited budget. Very innovative ideas are bred from such environments, but they rarely produce market-ready concepts. I think you need to differentiate between science and engineering, and pure research vs. development. NASA is both a research and a development organization. Engineering is all about trade-offs between time, budgetary and technical constraints. Science is about uncovering new knowledge. Science in the absence of constraints is marvelous. Engineering in the absence of constraints and experience is a disaster. Ask any contractor.
The mission failed due to poor engineering and a lack of oversight (no process to detect and correct technical errors). The only way humans can deal with such issues is through management and process. It sucks, but it's all we have.
Metric: Negatory - do not advance.
English: No don't stop. [oooooh]
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
They must have been using metric feet per second.
The ______ Agenda
It is almost too obvious of a conclusion, which may make this the most ingenious way to hide a live fire test...
using only it's own sensors
"its".
I guess thats what happens when you name a spacecraft DART.
The equipment was never at stake, it was lost the second the launch started.
The survival of both S/C may have been increased by the failure as their orbit was increased by the collision.
c) It was older and had better insurance.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
I'm not faulting the engineers. I'm just saying that if these predicted problems were really as some people painted them (inevitable), then engineers would surely share some of the blame for not communicating properly if it was not fixed.
I don't think they were seen by engineers as inevitable, so I don't think that engineers are necessarily to blame. But likewise, if the engineers didn't see a problem as inevitable, it's hard to lay all the blame at management's feet, as is the slashdot style.
It has lived up to its name, DART.
`Doing technical things can't be done properly unless insightful scientists and engineers are [...] allowed to bypass the directional controls that management so loves, uninhibited from pointing our core problems [...], and totally unshackled from the demands of time management.'
It turns out that there is a solution: look at CERN, where the Web was developed to help technical people - well, `just get on with the job' as you recognise they must. CERN's solution - of which the Web is merely a useful tool - only works for big international colloborative scientific projects (CERN, ITER, and the like), but it does work and does involve an anarchist approach, but applied by intelligent, educated, largely co-operative people most of whom are trying to get a sensible job done and all of whom are checking each other like hawks.
What's needed now is someone to work out how to apply that way of doing things to organizations run for political or financial gain. NASA's contractors make big money, and they make it *in the USA* - allowing politicians whose constituencies include operations run by NASA and its contractors to gain political capital.
Personally, I reckon NASA is viewed as a big success by its political masters, since it's been a very useful tool for divvying up the federal budget (etc). What sane engineer would truck the Space Shuttle's solid fuel boosters thousands of miles across a continent from the re-conditioning/manufacturing site to the launch site? Expensive and dangerous. It's a political decision to do that kind of thing.
Don't drink and orbit.
This just in! 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the population.
Pondering - Douglas Adams should have thought of this. Space insurance! Get in on the ground floor before anyone else. SpaceShipOne has already made it and thermosphere travel is going to be the norm in the near future, you better start now. Think IPO and huge venture capital. Give the stock market something interesting to bite on. Wait a minute, who gets to go up and settle the claim? Will Earl Scheib open an orbiting body shop?? Time will tell.
There goes NASA's no-claims bonus.
~The TwoTailedFox posts again....
Wow, they take in a negative value and get out a positive one??? Never in my life have I heard of a unit conversion which utilized a sign change, except for maybe converting between US and European fuel economies--I think that involves an exponent of e and multiplying by your astrological sign.
weapons in space
NASA's first anti-satellite weapon was a resounding success. Unfortunately, it wasn't designed as an anti-satellite weapon.
works don't need management, or rather, can manage themselves. I do every day. You read like your another one of these puffed up full of themselves asshat managers I detest so damn much. You people are destroying america!
That will buff right out...
"Mike broke the Hubble!" - Crow and Tom Servo
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
Very appropiate name for the spacecraft.... and was the satellite named bullseye?
Check out Website development, maintenance and accesibility cons
This illustrates why military aviators always believe there will be a role for aircraft actually flown by onboard pilots.
"Shit. In OpenGL, the negative on the Z-axis goes into the screen..."
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...or about the speed of a parking lot fender bender. So if both craft had bumbers they wouldn't be spening so much at the body shop.
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
So the simulation does not actually simulate reality... another sign of total incompetence. Your tax dollars at work.
- jonathan.
I guess that robot never watched Sesame Street so it did not know the difference between NEAR and far.
-Lazn
The word you're looking for is "cue," not "queue."
It must have had a flux capacitor because I read this story a few days ago.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Nowadays, the main problem with the NASA is that it has lacked serious competiton for the last 25 years. Just like General Motors (GM) and Ford, NASA lost its focus on quality due to the lack of competition.
The tide may be turning. NASA now faces renewed competition from Russia (which is flush with cash from sales of oil and natural gas) and Japan. Just as Honda drove both GM and Ford to improve their products, the Russian space agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will drive NASA to significantly improve its services and products.
After decades of a confused space agenda, the Tokyo combined its 3 independent space agencies into the new JAXA. JAXA's only mission is space supremacy.
Look at the artist's rendition of a future moon base manned by Japanese astronauts.
It is very sad that the Russian Space agency has had automated systems working for decades. Apart from the Soyuz with rendez-vous abilities, may I remind you of the Buran (the Soviet space shuttle equivalent), which could launch, deploy satellites and land without a pilot. All that in the 80's.
It is certain that NASA is underfunded. The military budjet skyrockets, the space science one goes down and is currently at 3% of the military budget (but only if we exclude war spending, just the basic military budjet!).
Oh well... No Apollo for our generation, I guess!
>> - the teams disregarded expert input
That implies that those experts had to report to someone else in their area of expertise who had the freedom to ignore them! In other words, some rather myopic manager set up a hierarchical reporting structure in which expert opinion COULD be disregarded. Why weren't those experts working within those teams or at the same level as those teams? See, this was a problem created by management in the first place.
Reconciling the conflicting opinions of experts is almost child's play, you can practically set up a program to do it, with full cognizance of probabilities, degree of expertise of participants, etc etc. What's the role of management here that you seem to think is so important? Management is an inherently unreliable contributor to this weighted decision making.
>> - Another example is the cowboy coder, writing without specifications or testing.
Be serious, we're talking about science and engineering experts, not cowboy coders.
>> - Every technical person would love to work [...] with a virtually unlimited budget.
That's a straw man, it wasn't even suggested. Good science and engineering doesn't cost more than poor science and engineering. It's merely the same general amount of effort but done properly, no corners cut and brushed under the carpet for managerial expediency. But yes, I'm sure that this would more often return a verdict of "Sorry, no go", but that would be accurate. You criticize it at your peril.
>> - Engineering is all about trade-offs between time, budgetary and technical constraints.
Yes, it is about tradeoffs, but management always trades off too much and technical soundness suffers. A professional engineer knows when something is "good enough" for the job in hand, not just from experience but because it's largely objective, a matter of probability computations. He doesn't need a manager to override his professional judgement. In so doing, a manager contributes nothing, but can be very damaging indeed. Plenty of examples of that at NASA.
>> - Engineering in the absence of constraints and experience is a disaster.
Regarding experience, that's a straw man again --- what would engineers without deep experience be doing working on a space probe? As for constraints, they're simply input to the engineer's working tradeoff set. No need for managers to impose other ones at all, the professional engineer is vastly experienced at doing it himself while understanding the technical side of what's being traded off.
>> - The mission failed due to poor engineering and a lack of oversight (no process to detect and correct technical errors).
Exactly, and that's purely a direct consequence of management being decoupled from the very concrete engineering process. No professional engineer needs oversight to implement those checks --- only working to management's directions produces that kind of rubbish. Peer review ensures that perfectly adequately by itself. If one engineer or one team misses something crucial, the peer engineers or peer teams pick it up. A manager with oversight is a very poor substitute for this process of peers checking each others' work.
You seem to have no idea what real professional engineering entails. It's inherently a self-management process, and requires no oversight other than that of peers. Certainly NEVER management oversight.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I prefer this explanation
as it was a "missle".
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
I think they would be shouting "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNN!"
Washington, D.C. 2:00 PM - The Department of Homeland Security is pleased to announce the successful test of an anti-satellite missile, designed to destroy terrorist communications satellites and space-based platforms for weapons of mass destruction.
The DART missile located and destroyed a mock terrorist satellite, disguised as an experimental communications satellite.
For national security purposes, the test was not announced until after the DART crashed into the satellite. Spokespeople did not answer questions about why NASA long described this as an attempt to harmlessly rendezvous with the satellite, referring instead to "Democrats who want America to be attacked by terrorists instead of supporting our troops".
I manage a subcontract to a small company struggling with an "unfettered technical genius" problem. We make exceptions for their genius when we can, but if we just pay them to do whatever they think is best, then we often wind up with a result that doesn't fulfill the intended purpose, but some other purpose the genius perceived.
There's a discipline in the aerospace biz called "Systems Engineering." It's about documenting mission requirements as quantitatively as possible, breaking those requirements down into solveable problems for the specific engineering disciplines, and then verifying that the problems are solved in a way that meets the mission requirements, and proving it.
The "unfettered geniuses" resent us because they don't get to do whatever the heck they please. But they generally enjoy solving problems enough to get the job done right.
Then there's the "inept," "incompetent," and "corrupt," who absolutely hate us because when we systems engineers do our jobs, their ineptitude, corruption and incompetence are revealed. They can be design engineers, managers, or customers.
Or even systems engineers.
Sounds like the latter problem is what occured on DART. And as a former Orbital employee, I am not suprised in the slightest.
I can see the fnords!
Another report of the unconstitutional Nasa wasting more tax dollars. This is yet another reason why the citizens should band together and vote straight Libertarian in the next election and every election thereafter.
________________________________________________
A vote against a Libertarian candidate is
a vote to abolish the Constitution itself.
Oh for heavens sake - the russians have been doing this for decades with their KURS automated docking system on the Progress and Soyuz vehicles. Has worked very reliably. The only time they've had a collision was when they tried to fly a manual remote-control docking, rather than use the automated system. Buy one, pull it apart, learn something.
NASA seems to be very good at errors in math. This one boggles the mind. It's easy enough to screw up in an exam and get partial credit, but you'd think someone would take the time to double check when that time is alloted to them.
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Duhrr... Head Managers work without managers over them... so I guess 100% of businesses in the USA are run by someone who is influenced - at most - only by peers to their position.
However, I'm sure you see the word "Worker" and automatically assume a room-temperature IQ, a namebadge with "employee of the week" star on it, working for minimum wage -- not a room full of MIT grads whose combined IQ is higher than your yearly salary. With the attitude you show toward the word "work" I wouldn't be surprised to hear that you yourself are a manager.
And the "Cite your source!" argument on slashdot is getting old. If you really want sources, you can google them for yourself and not blabber on it. If you don't really care for sources but are just throwing it around as an argument, don't bother typing it out. You may just end up getting wrecked.
Unbeknownst to engineers at the time, but beknownst to us...
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/
Introduction
How to begin to tell the story of Autodesk? The company was so unusual in its origin, so unconventional in its growth, and so eventful has been the road that started with a small group of programmers sitting around talking about building a company and has led, so far, to a multinational company which is the undisputed leader in its market, that it's tempting just to shrug your shoulders and say ``you had to be there''.
Because Autodesk started out as a very decentralised organisation and has remained one to some extent, and also because of the prolix proclivities of its founders, who would rather write a book than talk on a telephone for ten minutes, the genesis, evolution, and history of Autodesk has generated a large volume of paper.
Unlike many companies, whose history can be recovered, if at all, only by a major oral history effort, one can watch Autodesk develop by reading the documents that were, during the company's development, the primary means of communication between the people involved. Reading these documents lets you see how assumptions we seldom question today got cast into concrete, how many blind alleys we had to explore to find answers which seem, in retrospect, utterly obvious, and how throughout the history of the company, when a major effort was called for to advance the company, Autodesk people have always responded with the energy, creativity, responsibility, and dedication which are the largest reasons for Autodesk's great success in the market.
Too many business books, like histories of science, tend to tell the story as a straightforward progression from start to finish. Reality is never that easy. Decisions are made in the face of incomplete and unreliable information because they must be made. There's no way to tell a promising avenue of success from a blind alley when you turn onto it--you only find out much later. As you read through these documents, you'll be seeing it all, and if it seems tedious and repetitious, it's because the process of building a company is often tedious and repetitious. But it's also rewarding, and I hope that these documents also convey the feeling of exhilaration, challenge, and accomplishment that everybody felt as we built this company into what it is today.
When you read these documents, you're opening time capsules buried as Autodesk developed. The documents are presented with essentially no editing other than that required to convert them from the variety of document processors in which they were written into . Some irrelevant material, such as five-year-old name and address lists, has been deleted but no elisions have been made which rewrite history, cover up errors, or otherwise alter the record. Where appropriate, I've added footnotes to explain matters which might not be clear at several years remove and to call out important items mentioned in passing in the text.
Since this is a history in documents, the picture of the company it presents is unavoidably coloured by the documents available when this history was prepared. The resulting collection weights my contribution heavier than it was because I write prolifically and keep everything I write. It covers AutoCAD-80 far out of proportion to its importance because the AutoCAD-80 logs exist in machine-readable form and the AutoCAD-86 logs do not. There is little coverage of the rich history of CAD/camera, and little of the development of Autodesk's marketing and sales organisation. The history is also weighted toward the early days of the company because as the company has grown business has come to be transacted far more in meetings and via ephemeral memoranda than in explicit status reports. As a result, nothing of the second public stock offering has been included, nor anything of the development of AutoCAD AEC or of AutoSketch. The absence of documents in this history is simply the effect of what has been preserved, not an attempt on my part to emphasise or diminish the importance of
They simply had the sensors mounted back to front ..... again.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
My only question is how you would execute this plan without it failing. Then you'd have to test it in a company. Perhaps within a small project team first and then expand as success occur.
I did an undergraduate design competition where we pretty much had free reign to do what we wanted for the design but had a mid-term and a final review where we got feedback. The deadlines were set and we had no funding since this was academic. I enjoyed that management style from up top even though the program manager wasn't all there. Perhaps this is the system you are suggesting?
I'm not a fan of completely removing management from the picture and giving free reign. But at the same time, overbearing management isn't a great solution either.
From a later post: Why weren't those experts working within those teams or at the same level as those teams?
Is it not likely that these experts have their own projects to run and work on as well? The people I work with all have multiple projects they are on. Even our graduate advisors (the role of expert) had more important things for them to work on. Sure, they could have been on our team and done the work for us but then, it's their design and they have the knowledge and don't share why things are that way. This might not be completely what happened at NASA but it could be. Granted, ignoring expert opinions completely isn't something we did. I wonder who gets hit with the "you fucked up stick".
From what I have seen and heard about how NASA does things, I would say that budget constraints probably played a role in this accident. I have also noticed that the older, more experienced NASA scientists and engineers often seem reluctant to help the younger scientists and engineers get the training and experience they will eventually need when it is their turn to lead a mission. I think a lot of older scientists and engineers are afraid they will be forced to retire when funding gets tight, so they prevent the younger people from being involved in mission development/operations as long as they can. The older scientists and engineers love their jobs so much that they just can't let go when it is time. I've seen older scientists who were within a year or two of retirement take on a new satellite hardware project even though the mission would not be launched until several years after they retired. Due to retirements and the deaths of 50+ year-old scientists, younger scientists may suddenly find that they are a critical part of a spacecraft instrument team, even though they have little or no experience with this sort of thing. NASA is just not encouraging the older, more experienced principal investigators to pass on their knowledge to the younger scientists and engineers. There doesn't seem to be a clear path to train and advance the younger people, with gradually increasing mission responsibilities as they gain experience. In my opinion, this is one of NASA's biggest problems right now.
d) PROFIT!
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.