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.'"

Comments

Design by commitee

[linzeal]

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

Re:Design by commitee

[causality]

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

Sounds like a bunch of smelly hands.

So ?

[Fred_A]

Aren't they covered by warranty ? Get them to replace them.

Re:So ?

[TheLink]

I think the main problem is when you ask for on site support.

They'll look at you as if you came from another planet or something.

Re:So ?

[confused one]

But they want you to pay the return shipping.

Re:So ?

[Sockatume]

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.

Re:So ?

[Enter the Shoggoth]

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.

My Mother, NASA oven test engineer . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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.

Re:My Mother, NASA oven test engineer . . .

[pavon]

The lander wasn't made by NASA, JPL, or anyone like that. It was designed and assembled by the University of Arizona, who naturally had to get most of the parts fabbed by other folks.

Human Mars mission

[wfstanle]

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.

Re:Human Mars mission

[Toonol]

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.

Re:NASA might be tampering with photos

[Fastolfe]

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

Re:haha

[S.O.B.]

Maybe it was the Martian government trying to protect local jobs from foreign workers.