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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.
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.
Overheard in a NASA deep space probe software lab....
"It compiles! ship it!"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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.
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?
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.
No, Cassini is a joint NASA/ESA project. The Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) was provided by ESA.
The Gish Bar Times - Blog covering Jupiter's moon Io
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.