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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 were alien bacteria in the ice samples, and NASA is covering it up by claiming that the probe didn't work.
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.
Tastes like.....
chicken.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.
I'm not sure I see how a software upgrade causing a "software hiccup" is an example of irony. Maybe I'll try that on my boss sometime... "No, that's not a regression... That's an ironic hiccup"
Note to self: Turn off Windows Automatic Update...
Overheard in a NASA deep space probe software lab....
"It compiles! ship it!"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Ctl+Alt+Del
Task Manager to kill the hung process.
Sheesh... DUH.
You should always ask before you try tasting a bust - last time I got slapped in the face. And probing? Hoo boy.
This is just one data point in a rather big history. At least they didn't confuse feet-per-second with meters-per-second; at least they didn't cause their CPU to thrash due to a radar being left on and overloading the interrupts. Also, this is the same organization that managed to put two quite-autonomous rovers on Mars and keep them rolling for, what is it now?, 4 years. When one of the rovers did have a software failure, and a really bad mission-killing one, they were able to debug it and update firmware OTA from light-minutes distance, on a machine that was only intermittently alive.
They screw things up, but they seem to do very well at fault-tolerance and recovery, and I think if I were in automated systems, I'd wanna be at NASA over anywhere else, period.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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
Seriously? Somebody modified a program so that a system designed to do one thing could do something else and sent the modifications millions of miles across space on a radio link. There's probably not much chance of a three tier development/test/production environment here.
In the meantime, the overall Cassini project has already been incredibly successful; the happy little Mars rovers have gotten unstuck by virtue of some pretty good software hacks, but you, "Phat Tony", call into question NASA's procedures.
Seriously?
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
These craft - their software, hardware, and the interactions between them - are so complex that there is no way to exhaustively test everything. It's complex enough that you can't even determine what an exhaustive test criteria would be. If we wanted exhaustive testing to ensure that nothing wrong ever happens, we'd never get anything off the ground. Mistakes happen, the unforeseen happens, and when communications take hours to go through, it is just plain hard. You live with it, correct mistakes as they happen, and make the best of it. They'll get a chance to try again. They have already logged tremendous amounts of data that couldn't have been gotten any other way - it's not like the whole $1.5b mission is a bust. This probe, the largest and most complex NASA has ever launched, has been operating continuously, with very few problems and no critical failures, for over a decade now.
NASA, in general, is a lot more stringent with its software than most organizations. If you would like to know more about it, you could start here.
100% agree.
My sig explains the human factor quite well, what makes NASA engineers stand out above the rest is just how often they manage to carry on regardless.
In situations where normal people would give up they find a solution.
liqbase
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?
Why are you ignoring the Japanese, Chinese, Indians, Russians, and Europeans for baseline comparisons? Not to mention our own home-grown private industries like Ball, Boeing, and Lockheed-Martin. Or perhaps you'd prefer the military (as the grandfather post suggest), which also flies spacecraft?
So maybe the lesson here is "spaceflight is hard," and not "NASA sucks"? You're talking about writing software for custom-built hardware to do things that no Earth-based software has to do. And it's not like you can beta test stuff out like Mozilla does, either. If there's some obscure combination of hardware and software settings that will lead to a glitch, but everything is fine otherwise, it'll be damn hard to locate without spending many millions more for extremely extensive testing. There's a point of diminishing returns, perfection simply doesn't happen.
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.
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.