PBS's "Nova" and MER

In article ,
Andrew Gray wrote:
to reduce the probability of such problems. Note that such problems are
not precluded by a policy of having all software on board at launch time,
as witness the Huygens receiver problem (which might have been fixable
had a software upload been possible...), not to mention MPL, not to

This reminds me. Didn't MPL get an emergency software upload, as a
result of the MCO loss - which did help, in that it got into the
atmosphere and lasted long enough for a different software glitch to
kill it - or am I thinking at crossed purposes here?

You're thinking at crossed purposes. There was nothing wrong with MPL's
navigation; it did not share MCO's problem and didn't need an update.
There *were* a few late changes made, as a result of a hasty post-MCO-loss
review of MPL, but it's unclear whether any of them were actually crucial.

Oh - Hyugens reciever problem? As in Cassini/Hyugens?

Right, except that this one's basically entirely a Huygens problem. (The
receiver subsystem aboard Cassini was built by the Huygens side of the
effort, not the Cassini side.)
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:
Oh - Hyugens reciever problem? As in Cassini/Hyugens?

Have they ever fixed the Euro-U.S. compatibility screw-up in regards to
that?

There wasn't one. It was a Euro-Euro compatibility screwup. Cassini's
Huygens receiver was built by the Huygens project, not the Cassini project.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

On Mon, 5 Jan 2004 17:16:08 GMT, (Henry Spencer)
wrote:

or the extremely young average age (by engineering standards) of the
people involved in the MER program as shown in the special, after Dan
Goldin's scythe cut down all the old pros at NASA.

Most of the old pros have hit retirement age anyway. The problem goes
back much farther than Goldin -- it's a consequence of post-Apollo
contraction and the accompanying hiring freezes.

And actually, young is good. An unfortunately large fraction of the
middle-aged people at JPL, and NASA in general, are viewgraph engineers
whose net contribution to a fast-paced results-oriented project would be
negative. (If memory serves, the people picking the Mars Pathfinder team
carefully excluded them.)

I don't think these folks are all that young in NASA terms, anyway.
It's never been odd to have junior engineers holding down very
important jobs. Being a lead engineer in a discipline frequently
happens at a youngish age, younger than is typical in industry.

We've had fresh-outs who were experts on a particular topic fairly
soon after they joined a project. It's a sink-or-swim process that
makes them the expert, of course, but that's what happens when you're
understaffed and spread too thin.

I can remember a time or two when I was the expert and I wasn't even
thirty yet. In fact, I can remember being the expert as a summer hire
back when I had just finished my first year of college. I ended up
teaching what I knew to three engineers just so they'd let me go back
to college that fall. I just happened to have had the experience with
the CalComp plotters and had a knack for it. That's when I learned
how difficult it could be to teach something that "came naturally".

I can also remember carefully picking a project team to be sure we had
some good PowerPoint Warriors, although this happened both before and
after PowerPoint became available. They handled that part, dealing
with management, while the rest of us went off and did the work. It
pains me to admit it, but there is some truth to what management says
about needing to be informed about what project teams are up to.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer

On Wed, 07 Jan 2004 03:53:48 GMT, (Derek
Lyons) wrote:

Scott Ferrin wrote:

In case you didn't notice I admitted I was *WRONG*

Um, no. You didn't.


LOL (You ever seen the Fonz on Happy Days?) Anyway okay I was wrong.




You stated 'if that was the case', which is not an admission of being
wrong, but a dodge. You then restated your original, and incorrect,
thesis that the alignment was a far cry from the 'level, flat' floor.


No, I was saying that aligning it onboard a ship was. Meaning if that
can get that kind of alignment on a ship, in a shipyard, why do they
need a perfect floor?





but it seems you think you have cause to celebrate so I guess that
justifies your enthusiasm.

It's not enthusiasm, but pointing out that statement that was wrong
remains wrong when restated.

D.

In message , rk
writes

TRIANA

Isn't Goresat just a piece of political nonsense that's never going to
be launched, so we'll never know? Now _that's_ a waste of money and
resources that could have gone to better use.
--
Rabbit arithmetic - 1 plus 1 equals 10
Remove spam and invalid from address to reply.

Henry Spencer wrote:

In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:

Oh - Hyugens reciever problem? As in Cassini/Hyugens?

Have they ever fixed the Euro-U.S. compatibility screw-up in regards to
that?


There wasn't one. It was a Euro-Euro compatibility screwup. Cassini's
Huygens receiver was built by the Huygens project, not the Cassini project.

Correct. But to answer the actual question, no, they didn't really
fix it- but they did work around it. They changed the mission
plan/release conditions to limit the doppler shift to something that the
receiver could handle. Originally, it was to be released on the way in
to Saturn orbit, as nearly the first act of encounter. Now it will be
released well after orbital insertion. How far after can be seen by
looking at the Cassini timeline from the web site.

Of course, it remains to be seen if it works, and the
receiver/Doppler shift problem is only one of numerous ways it could
fail. It will be a spectacular, highly useful, and pioneering mission if
it all comes off as planned! Let's hope for the best.


Brett

In article ,
says...
Diane Wilson wrote:
None of this is new; fault-tolerance concepts and continuous
operation have been around for a long time. A lot of our
key infrastructure items (think about phone systems, power,
etc.) run this way.

And a lot of time and money is spent ensuring that the redundancy and
fault tolerance *works*. The concepts are simple, but the execution
is far from it.

Yup, it's not cheap. It's worth doing when the cost of failure
is even greater.

Diane

"Mary Shafer" wrote in message
...

I can remember a time or two when I was the expert and I wasn't even
thirty yet.

Ooooo! Smart *and* sexy! Stop teasing me!
--
If you have had problems with Illinois Student Assistance Commission (ISAC),
please contact shredder at bellsouth dot net. There may be a class-action
lawsuit
in the works.

In article , Brett Buck wrote:

Correct. But to answer the actual question, no, they didn't really
fix it- but they did work around it. They changed the mission
plan/release conditions to limit the doppler shift to something that the
receiver could handle. Originally, it was to be released on the way in
to Saturn orbit, as nearly the first act of encounter. Now it will be
released well after orbital insertion. How far after can be seen by
looking at the Cassini timeline from the web site.

Late December release, last I looked, I think... Bizzarely, I noticed
this t'other day, and wondered why it happened (I'd remembered the
earlier encounter plan), but never heard of the intermediate steps...

--
-Andrew Gray

In article , rk wrote:
Jonathan Silverlight wrote:

In message , rk
writes

TRIANA

Isn't Goresat just a piece of political nonsense that's never
going to be launched, so we'll never know? Now _that's_ a waste
of money and resources that could have gone to better use.

Frankly I don't know. It was an FBC mission, it was finished and
built, and the last I heard it was in storage keeping it in flight
condition

I believe the current problem is that it was designed to be launched on
Shuttle - slated for STS-107 at one point, in fact - and that provides
as good an excuse to quietly can it as anything. STS isn't going to be
flying any more big bulky satellite deployments, so...

It's kind of gone out of the realm of "political embarrasment" now, I
think, and into "well, it might have been a nice idea, but..."

(It'd be an interesting detail to see a list of what *is* sitting in the
clean rooms with no definite plan for the future...)

--
-Andrew Gray