Slashdot Mirror
Cassini Geyser-Tasting a Bust
Maggie McKee writes "The Cassini spacecraft flew into the icy geysers erupting from Saturn's moon Enceladus on Wednesday in an attempt to figure out what they were made of, but a glitch prevented the probe from actually 'tasting' the plumes. An 'unexplained software hiccup' put the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) out of commission. Ironically, new software designed to improve the ability of the CDA to count particle hits may be to blame. Mission managers may try to re-attempt the plume fly-through later this year."
There wasn't anything mentioned about the software beyond what the summary said, so we are left to speculate. Unless someone who works on the software is around here, you're not gonna find an answer other than maybe the stock "NASA sucks these days" that has become so prevalent since the shuttle's problems.
I'm just hoping everything goes right the next time around. It's going to be much closer and we "should" get the data we've been searching for.
I got a catholic block.
NASA is probably not entirely to blame. They contract out so much stuff, that a lot of problems are created by interoperability issues between hardware and software designed by different companies.
Remember that NASA doesn't actually get very much funding given what is expected of them. If they had a military budget and they screwed up it would be a different story...
Taxpayers complain about having to foot the bill for millions of dollars of research in something where the actual value to those taxpayers isn't properly explained to them. Government legislators get elected by promising to cut "pork barrel spending" to programs like NASA. Budgets get slashed, partisan hacks/beancounters get put into management positions at NASA. Quality assurance budgets get cut. Software quality goes down.
There you go. You can't have something that you don't want to pay for.
OK, lookit. There are about a dozen instruments on Cassini. One (1) failed to return data on this pass. Yes, this pass was good for CDA, but it isn't the only instrument. It isn't even the only one that can sample the plume in situ. INMS, RPWS, MIMI, and CAPS all come to mind as candidates to give us useful information (INMS in particular can help clarify composition). All of these returned their data from what I've heard. (And no, that's all I can say until those teams want to speak up.)
CDA's failure is unfortunate to be sure, but it isn't catastrophic. Could the entire news media please stop sensationalizing this?
Last I checked, Cassini was an ESA (European Space Agency) project.
I think there are quite a few Slashdotters who need geography lessons.
Been there, Done that, Sold the t-shirt to the next idiot in line
It doesn't give me much confidence that we're heading towards applications and operating systems that won't crash anytime soon when we can't even get something this important right. It really makes me curious about the whole software quality assurance program at NASA.
Hold your horses, Tex. It says in the article that they tuned the software to better pick up such particles. They may have had a big choice to keep it the way it was and play it safe, or get fancy to pick up much more data. You don't know what decisions they faced and are thus judging prematurely.
Remember, the instruments weren't originally designed for such, so they may have had to "get creative". There's always risk in exploration.
NASA has some of the best QA practices ever invented:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html
However, it takes time and money. I doubt the Geyser team had much time, for this pass-by is relatively recent in the probe plans.
Table-ized A.I.