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Mars Phoenix Lander's Ovens Were Destined To Fail

Posted by Soulskill on from the double-checking-is-for-wimps dept.

RobertB-DC writes "The Phoenix mission to Mars' frigid polar regions was going to be tricky from the start, with only a few weeks to perform as much science as possible. Success depended on everything working right. But one of the mission's most frustrating glitches — the stuck doors on the TEGA ovens — could have been prevented with basic quality control on Earth. Nature is reporting that bad brackets were replaced by the manufacturer ... with identically bad brackets. The Planetary Society blog sums it up succinctly: 'Ouch. Ouch ouch ouch.'"

9 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. Design by commitee by linzeal · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is what happens when too many people have their hands up the engineers and by extension the technicians' asses.

    --
    An Education is the Font of All Liberty
  2. Human space exploration. by slmouradian · · Score: 2, Insightful

    One more thing to add to my list why humans should be involved in space exploration, not just robots.. Perhaps this could be fixed if there was a human there?!

    1. Re:Human space exploration. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Face it - humans (at least, American humans representing NASA) aren't going to Mars any time soon. The bad PR from a fatal mission failure would be too much for them to overcome, so they will never try. The West is too pussy whipped by the safety police to attempt manned interplanetary exploration.

      Plus, this problem could have been averted by simply checking the oven bracket design again after it came back from Honeybee. Honeybee should be sued for returning a flawed design a second time and ruining the mission. Either sued, or banned from NASA's list of approved suppliers.

    2. Re:Human space exploration. by sjames · · Score: 2, Insightful

      One more thing to add to my list why humans should be involved in space exploration, not just robots.. Perhaps this could be fixed if there was a human there?!

      That's not a very good reason to send humans to Mars. For the difference in cost, we can send a dozen or so replacement probes before we even approach the cost of a manned mission.

      We would do well to expand our orbital presence first. We need better than chemical propulsion and we need life support systems that can run as a closed system. It's much better to test that in orbit where a failure means we evacuate and try again rather than on a Mars mission where failure means transmit your last words.

      Once we have a significant orbital presence, that also gives us the ability to build and launch the Mars vehicle in orbit. That is, only the lander portion need be designed to operate in an atmosphere at all and only needs to handle landing and takeoff in Mars' gravity. The Earth-mars transport vehicle can be entirely un-aerodynamic and need only support it's own thrust.

  3. Re:So ? by Sockatume · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Seriously, they should do this. Hold them to the same standards as a washing machine company. If a contractor screws up, they're going to pay for sending an engineer out there to fix the product. (And if they want him back, they can pay or that too.) If they don't want to do that, well, they can pay for a whole new mission. Then they're less likely to do things like skip diagnostics and fuck up multi-million dollar missions.

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    No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
  4. Re:So ? by Enter+the+Shoggoth · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This reminds me of the the Apple iBook I have rotting in a draw somewhere, Apple acknowledged that the product had a known design fault, but all they did was replace the logicboard with an identical one, which of course would also fail, in my case I went through _six_ logicboards, two of them in the one go (the tech replaced it and it failed during testing so had to be replaced again before it was returned to me)

    What really amazes me about this is that it is legal. This is due (in my country at least) to corrupt politicians taking too many brown paper bags full of cash in return for winding back consumer protection laws... if a manufacturer acknowledges that there is a known _design_ fault and then continues to provide the faulty product they aught at the very least be told to replace the faulty product with a _redesigned_ one without someone having to go to the trouble of filing suit. Personally, in addition to this I think the executives should also be sent to pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

    --
    Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
    Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
  5. documentation by wkk2 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Everything needs a version number and serial number.

  6. Re:Human Mars mission by Toonol · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think there would be no shortage of volunteers. And by that, I mean, millions of volunteers, including all astronauts, and everybody that wants to be one.

    I'm kind of surprised to read a poster on slashdot write they wouldn't volunteer for a one-way mission.

  7. Re:Hm... by tftp · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yes, it is a horrible engineering. However these are one-off designs that never existed before and will never exist after. There is no legacy to build upon, and there is no "Release 1" to learn from. The very first release flies the mission, and if there are bugz ... too bad. To confound the problem, much of this work is probably done by scientists and not by engineers; that's why if the gap between doors is above zero it's all good to go. An experienced mechanical engineer would consider thermal expansion, free play in all pivot points, and other things - but first she'd try to increase the gap to some reasonable size, so that none of those secondary effects could affect the mission.