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."
To be honest I have to say it is disturbing how many millions have been wasted on projects to have been ruined by very simple glitches in software, sure this sort of analysis software is probably quite complex I don't know I didn't write it. But when millions of $CURRENCY is spent on a complex piece of hardware which has a single chance of success it's hardly like we get these probes back to reuse or anything that more care should be taken to ensure the software can do it's job otherwise it is a waste of money building all that expensive hardware, it's not like such mistakes are that infrequent.
However it is not like mistakes like this are just something that happens with NASA, the ESA's first launch of an Ariane 5 launch vehicle resulted in failure due to an issue where a 64 bit floating point number was being stuck into a 16 bit signed integer space within the vehicle guidance system causing it reportedly to attempt to make an extreme and unwarranted cause correction and ultimately end up breaking up with the loss of the launch vehicle and its payload of 4 Cluster Mission spacecraft resulting in a total loss valued at US$370 million. - Ariane 5 Flight 501
Yep, but exactly how do you do input validation on something like this. The best thing they could do would recreate a version of the Cassini EXACTLY on the ground with all known faults in its sensors and test all software on that. And you know what, mistakes would still happen, because its FAR away, and there is no way to test the real Cassini's sensors till after its already passed what it was supposed to sense.