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Mars Phoenix Lander's Ovens Were Destined To Fail
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.'"
This is what happens when too many people have their hands up the engineers and by extension the technicians' asses.
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Aren't they covered by warranty ? Get them to replace them.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
How will we know exactly how extremely high altitudes affect baking times now?
Ovens?
Sounds like too many cooks were involved.
...isn't this what happens when you gotta have it yesterday?
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?!
I wonder who lost their humour by marking this a troll.
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"were just a hair's width too big"
and is obstructing the door??? that's some horrible engineering.
From the blog:
Boynton and his team had noticed, on a test version of TEGA, that the brackets at the bottom of this cover were just a hair's width too big, and as a result obstructed the doors. They sent revised designs for the cover to the manufacturer, Honeybee Robotics of New York. New parts were delivered and installed. But Honeybee had made the new parts using the original flawed designs -- and nobody in Tucson checked them. "They should've caught it and we should've caught it, but neither of us did," says Boynton, ruefully.
. . . which is why NASA needs to hire my mother as oven test engineer. Not only would she have noticed "hair's width" difference, she would have taken every opportunity she had to complain to everyone she knows, and even total strangers about it.
On the other hand, once the door problem got fixed, she would find something else wrong with it, and the damn thing would probably never get off the ground.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I'll just leave this here.
You are forgetting something ...
Some plans for a manned Mars mission were based on there not being a return trip to Earth. Anyone who went on such a mission would be marooned there on purpose. It's not a kind of trip I would like to take.
``Nature is reporting that bad brackets were replaced by the manufacturer... with identically bad brackets.''
Isn't that just purely amazing? A manufacturer who _knows_ the component is bad (because it needs replacement), and then replaces it with ... the same thing with the same faults. That's just unethical. I hope they are suitably punished.
Also, you would have thought that, after sending a component back for replacement, the replacement would be tested to see if the problem had been fixed.
I just don't have words anymore.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Off-topic, and the author is an idiot. The rovers' cameras do not necessarily take pictures using the standard red-green-blue colors that we perceive. Depending on what filters were used (for scientific reasons), if you want a "full color" image for humans to appreciate, you have to choose or synthesize non-RGB channels to form an RGB image. The blue tab, for example, on the color calibration target is also very bright in the infrared, so if you use an infrared image as your red channel, what should be blue appears to be pink. All of this perfectly normal and completely expected by everyone that knows how this stuff works. Stop being a silly conspiracy theorist and apply some rational thought and a tiny bit of research.
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/hoagland/mars_colors.html
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/spirit/a12_20040128.html
Everything needs a version number and serial number.
I am very picky and stubborn with things. And that' why I have a job in software quality assurance (SQA). I always finds things that bother me even it is a pixel size problem. :D
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Most of the comments so far are focusing on the oven door problems. Naturally, because that's what's mentioned in the summary and no one RTFAs.
Anyway, the *much* more interesting revelation is that after the problems came up, the directive came all the way down from the top of NASA directing the mission scientists to change their plans. "At the end of June, word came down that the Phoenix team was to treat its next TEGA sample as its last, and to go after a sample of rock-hard ice before it did anything else. The Tucson team had lost its autonomy." After that, the team blew at least a month trying to meet this directive, and missed out on doing some of the basic science they wanted to do, just so NASA heads could trumpet feel-good publicity about having detected ice with Phoenix.
http://www.goroadachi.com/etemenanki/mars-hiddencolors.htm
Echoes my thoughts. You could very well be right, but at least be open to other possibilities.
"Each image is not really color, but greyscale (what some people erroneously call "black and white"),"
Well, for decades greyscale TV was called B/W tv, walk into any photographers shop and they talk about 'black n white' photos.
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It seems that private industry has figured out that when dealing with the gov't that they can regularly provide substandard products, go over budget and behind schedule with no negative consequences and usually benefit from these shenanigans. You blame private industry, others blame government for not providing the correct positive and negative feedback to private industry like any nonretarded entity would.
Clearly what happened is that the design was made specifying a tolerances of a blonde hair, and it was built to within a red one. When will these engineers learn to be more specific!
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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.'
Not to mention the diodes down its left side.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Other possibilities?? Maybe a thought experiment will re-activate the logic centers of your brain:
Let's say that I have three monochromatic images, each measuring the intensity of light at 430nm, 550nm, and 700nm. Your task is to turn these three images into a full-color image on a computer screen. These happen to be approximately the primary colors in the CIE RGB color space, so this should be an easy task. You just map the 430nm image to the blue layer, 550 to the green, and 700nm to the red.
Now I hand you a set of images at 480nm, 530nm, and 680nm. These are still reasonably close to the CIE RGB primaries, so you can probably do the same thing. But will the resulting image look the same? Or will there be subtle differences in color? (Hint: the second one.)
Let's replace the 680nm image with one at 980nm. What do you do now? The red channel is now way out in the infrared. People can't see in that wavelength, so the intensity of light at that wavelength is going to be completely foreign and strange. If you have a chip of paint in this photograph that reflects brightly at ~430nm, and again at ~900nm, what color is this chip going to appear when the red channel is 680nm versus 980nm?
But let's take this one step further. What if I handed you a set of images at 670nm, 800nm, and 980nm? What do you do then? How do you build an RGB images out of wavelengths that are effectively just shades of red and infrared?
There is no need to examine "other possibilities" because this is already well-understood. Everyone that's taken a basic college photography class understands how light and color work. These people are not surprised by this because they understand it. It's like expressing shock and awe about how a house holds itself together, and when a builder goes on about how nails work, you scoff and say, "you need to consider other possibilities!" Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean there's something magic or secret about it.
Here are the filters available to the Mars rover camera:
http://www.ominous-valve.com/pancam.html
There's also a picture of the color calibration target through each of these filters. Fire up Gimp and do some mixing and matching.
Depends on the film.
Photos taken with infrared film won't be described in a camera shop as being "black and white," but simply IR. The shades presented are related to the object's reflectivity at infrared, not with visible (white) light. X-ray photos aren't black and white, either - the shades grey in an x-ray photo have nothing at all to do with the color of the objects being x-rayed.
Black and white film, along with black and white TV, are both obviously different from these -- they both work with white light.
Kid-proof tablet..