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ISS Computer Failure
A number of readers wrote us with news of the computer problems on the International Space Station. Space.com has one of the better writeups on the failure of Russian computers that control the ISS's attitude and some life-support systems. Two out of six computers in a redundant system cannot be rebooted. The space shuttle Atlantis may have its mission extended until the problem is fixed. A NASA spokesman was optimistic that the problem can be resolved; worst-case scenario would be for the shuttle to evacuate everyone onboard the ISS. Engineers are working on the theory (among others) that the failure may have been triggered by new solar panels installed earlier in Atlantis's mission.
The investment in time, money, and energy has already been made. To abandon it now, no matter how dysfunctional it is, would be a bigger waste. If the initiatives to return to the Moon and move on to Mars are going to go forward (and given Congress' past performance in this regard, I highly doubt it), then ISS is a necessary platform to span the gap between the Earth and the Moon. MInd you, when the United States was first thinking of going to the Moon, Werner von Braun put forward the plan to build a space station first, then use it as the assembly point for the journey to the Moon. Then, the platform would already have been established, and the Space Shuttle would have been the next natural extension after the end of Apollo. But the idea was shelved in order to get to the Moon by 1970, and as a result we have the current situation. So, we have done it backwards, but to abandon it now would be truly a giant step in reverse.
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I know you're joking but I'm a sucker so here goes: attitude means, "which direction is it pointed" They use big gyroscopes to keep the station oriented so that the solar panels can track the sun.
Maybe the new solar panels are a new input to the attitude program - "I am a new solar panel, I need to be pointed this way so that my 1 axis motor can track the sun"
I caught a glimpse of one of the astronauts obviously attempting to retrieve some e-mail from his laptop.. And then complaining over the com that he was getting a "you can only have one instance of Outlook running" - ground control advised for a laptop reboot, but the guy upstairs wasn't too keen on doing that
The personal communication laptops the astronauts have are windows machines. The machines that run both ISS and Shuttle are **not**. They are derivatives of UNIX, and, as grandparent said, have many eyes and many thousands of dollars poured into each line of code. There was a good article not too long ago in Fast Company about the shuttle coding team.
From the article: the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors. That's impressive. The same care went into the ISS computers, at least from the US's side. I can't speak for Russia as I don't have that level of familiarity with them.
Last, everyone is talking about the 'russian' computers.. Well, this guy last night in the press conference did state these were actually "western style" *european* computers !
The Russian computers failed. The US computers have 'taken over' temporarily. Why? Because we have this nice little satellite network called TDRSS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System) which lets us relay communications with shuttle over the vast majority of the orbit. Russia does not. They can only communicate over line of sight, which is a few times each day for about 8 or so minutes.
All the russian computers are down again. There is a suspicion that the magnetic field generated by the new solar rays is interfering with their operation. If that's true then the ISS is in a bit of a pickle, since without the new solar arrays there's no power for the additional science modules that need to be added to the ISS, which means no need to fly the shuttle (or anything else) there anymore. Disconnecting the power from the new arrays may allow the computers to operate, but you're left with an ISS that close to useless.
If disconnecting the power doesn't fix them problem, then the situation is even worse... the station will have to be evacuated next Wednesday, and would no longer have attitude control. It is likely that it would tumble out of control before any new mission could be made, making it impossible to dock the the ISS and probably resulting in its eventual re-entry.
Things are not looking good.
I suspect you're joking or trolling, but the "billion-dollar space pen" is an urban myth.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
VxWorks isn't a UNIX, it is a real time operating system from Wind River. Its has POSIX compliance in a decent number of areas so writing a thread / task is similar to programming for UNIX, but it can be quite a different beast when it comes to actually running the software. My experience is that once you have the various application tasks debugged, it'll run practically forever. Though as the parent noted, a bad driver can spoil that in unexpected ways.
You're an idiot. That's a peeled away thermal blanket on top of a carbon honeycomb structure.
The US computers do however control the CMG's - the backups for the attitude thrusters[1], and the life support for the US side of the station. So even the loss of all the Russian computers wouldn't leave the station in trouble. (Unless CMG desaturation was required - which doesn't happen all that often.)
[1] Next year, IIRC, a second set of CMG's goes active and then the CMG's become primary with the attitude thrusters going into the backup role.