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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.
They need the russian guy from armageddon to bang on the side of the computers!
Maybe NASA didn't pay for Soyuz Ultimate Edition, with support for additional solar panels.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
"...control the ISS's attitude..."
So the ISS is throwing a temper tantrum? Just put it in time out
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Like many Slashdotters, when the computers at my job fail, my attitude tends to become uncontrollable as well.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
They're all made in Taiwan!!
At this point, as a US taxpayer, I'd much rather see the ISS finished rather than just leaving it up there as a pile of space junk.
It's kinda like finding out your house you're current building will cost twice as much as normal.
Do you just leave it half finished and abandon it or do you keep pumping money into it?
From TFA:
"The lights, the fans and, thank God, the potty, all those things are working," Suffredini said.
Well at least he has his priorities in order. God knows you don't want anyone looking into the Hubble to see the ISS going by with your ass hanging out of the window.
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.