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Crowdfunded, Solar-powered Spacecraft Goes Silent
Last week saw the successful launch of the Planetary Society's LightSail spacecraft, the solar-powered satellite that runs Linux and was crowdfunded on Kickstarter. The spacecraft worked flawlessly for two days, but then fell silent, and the engineering team has been working hard on a fix ever since. They've pinpointed the problem: a software glitch. "Every 15 seconds, LightSail transmits a telemetry beacon packet. The software controlling the main system board writes corresponding information to a file called beacon.csv. If you're not familiar with CSV files, you can think of them as simplified spreadsheets—in fact, most can be opened with Microsoft Excel. As more beacons are transmitted, the file grows in size. When it reaches 32 megabytes—roughly the size of ten compressed music files—it can crash the flight system." Unfortunately, the only way to clear that CSV file is to reboot LightSail. It can be done remotely, but as anyone who deals with crashing computers understands, remote commands don't always work. The command has been sent a few dozen times already, but LightSail remains silent. The best hope may now be that the system spontaneously reboots on its own.
One report I read made it sound like they were aware of the bug for a while. It's possible that they had to launch with an old version of the software because the patch wasn't ready yet, and being a secondary payload on a launch you have no say whatsoever as to the launch date. They probably expected to be able to upload the patch after launch, but the log filled up faster than expected.
That being said, it is shoddy programming to blindly write to a log on a resource-constrained embedded platform (or any platform, really. Just especially so on something like this), so somebody definitely goofed. All I am saying is that it probably was caught by testing, but couldn't be fixed in time due to various constraints. It was a dumb move on the developer's part to not do enough diligence and to rely too heavily on QA in the first place.
No, csv sure as hell is NOT a Microsoft format.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with Microsoft, as much as you seem to want to blame them.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.