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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.'"
Aren't they covered by warranty ? Get them to replace them.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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!
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