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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.
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.