In article ,
says...

Altimeter failure. The instrument indicates a much lower altitude than
the real one. So, thinking they are much lower, software ejects the
parachutes, then when the rockets are turned on, the altimeter tells
that they have landed and software shuts down the rockets.

Then it goes from there till the crash at 300Km/h with no parachute and
no rockets...

Single point failure. All mission relies on the altimeter.

Sounds like a possibly. But designing the thing to have a single point
of failure like this? Seems awfully silly. But, I suppose the lander
was a technology demonstrator, so perhaps not so surprising. Tech
demonstrators often lack redundancy in certain areas.

Unfortunately in this case failure means not being able to get back all
of the sensor data that was recorded, but could not be transmitted due
to limited "uplink" bandwidth. The lander reportedly had battery power
to enable it to transmit this data after a successful landing.

Jeff
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