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.

Comments

Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

I’m usually the first to defend others when some bug like this makes it through testing. Hindsight always being 20/20, only takes one bug amongst a million good bits of code, etc. But this just seems like something that even basic testing should have caught.

Did they not run this thing on the ground for a few weeks? That’s just basic testing, especially for something that is going to be inaccessible for a while. Also that some critical bit of processing relies on stuff being written (and then presumably read back from) a csv file is very worrying.

This sounds like some very shoddy work.

Re:Seriously?

[Mr D from 63]

Testing might have found it, but I'd say that regardless of testing they should assume something bad will happen with the software and have a mechanism in place to force reboot & update on a locked up system. Maybe they thought they did. Its a shame if they can't get it fixed.

Re:Seriously?

[mnooning]

As a retired QA guy, I can tell you that checking that no files can grow without bound is standard fare. Same with exercising all code for long periods of time, as you pointed out. That means there was not a single experienced QA guy on the team.

By the way, CSV was the golden standard for many years. Given the tight compactness/memory budget that space projects have, CVS with it's small foot print might well be the logical choice.

CSV

[Anonymous Coward]

I know the average IQ at /. has gone down over the years, but I think the explanation of what a CSV file is is slightly too much dumbing down.

Re:CSV

[ArcadeMan]

I think the "32 megabytes—roughly the size of ten compressed music files" part is even more insulting.

Re:What the computer needs is ...

[plopez]

No. They need programmers and sysadmins that knew that they were doing. E.g. roll log files and/or put logs on a non-critical partition. Systems Administration 101 for systems where memory and disk space are at a premium. It was a rookie mistake.