Programming Error Doomed Russian Mars Probe

Programming Error Doomed Russian Mars Probe

news.discovery.com

A computer programming error doomed Russia's Phobos-Grunt Mars spacecraft, a government board investigating the accident has determined.

In a report to be presented to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin on Tuesday, investigators concluded that the primary cause of the failure was "a programming error which led to a simultaneous reboot of two working channels of an onboard computer," the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti reported.

(visit the link for the full news article)

It's always nice when these snags in the fabric of international relations are sorted out. It seems so rare that this kind of crap gets settled to everyone's satisfaction.

Granted, this was no Cuban Missile Crisis, but it didn't help an already strained relationship with Russia. I mean, at least this is off our steaming plate of diplomatic beef, right? Er, da?


news.discovery.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

ETA: Sorry, mods, I cut and pasted the headline, didn't register the caps for some reason.

I wish they would make up their minds on this...

First it was from US interference using radar...

Then it was because of radiation....

Now its a programming error....

This is a simple case of "Oh snap! The space probe saw something. Quick, download the footage, hit the kill switch, and we'll call it an error."

given i can remember some nasa problems due to an errant bracket in their fortran code causing problems and i could imagine how long it would take to debug fortran as its hardly the programming language of choice for readability so debuging some tightly coded near assembly code with probably a few million lines would take a while to double check

It can take quite a lot of time track why something went wrong. I have spent months looking for bugs in systems. The software guys are the worst, when something goes wrong on a new system, it is ALWAYS the hardware that is at fault, and then the poor hardware developer has to prove that his hardware is working as it should before the software guys would even start looking at their code.

Some software systems gets so complicated, that a whole team of programmers work on it, and it is quite easy to miss bugs. Even in military or avionics or space systems, where the code has to be certified, quite a number of bugs still get through the process.

Sometimes it is not even a real bug, i.e. faulty code, but just a weird interaction of software and hardware, that only happens under very specific conditions, and to find those errors can take months (if ever).

How many other space probes had to be reprogrammed in space, or how many other space probes failed as a result of software? A LOT , I am just happy that they managed to find the bug, because now they can start working on their next probe

Orrrrr just a cover story for something else?

reply to post by Eidolon23


Somebody programmed the word " The " in there somewhere and the thing became crazy confused.

lol. small slavic joke....anyways..

Yea glad this thing did not get out of control. they don't have time for this anyways. they are pre-planning a way with syria and Iran...that takes some time to figure out.