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Mars Global Surveyor was ruined by programmers
NASA conducts a special investigation, trying to find out what exactly could destroy at the end of last year the Martian Orbital Cartographic appliances Mars Global Surveyor , which had previously served for a dozen years (it was lost in November 2006). The most probable explanation of the causes of the loss of the device today is a human mistake. Incorrect commands of the software loaded in June could have a fatal nature.
However, this theory is not the only one, and there are several more options that can explain the probe of the probe. Last week, the formation of the internal supervisory board was announced, designed to study all these facts. It is known that the Global Inspector has lost contact with earthly operators during a completely standard procedure associated with reorienting the panels of solar panels.
John McNamee, Deputy Director of the Department of Sunny Systems in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Laboratory - JPL ), said that the preliminary investigation revealed the presence of incorrect teams in the software, loaded on a spaceship in June. The new software, as usual, was aimed at optimizing the work of the spacecraft to extend its service life. Instead, incorrect teams, perhaps, caused overheating of the batteries and forced the device to go into secure mode. It is reported by AP with reference to the NASA Watch website. Overheating and failure of the battery, perhaps, led to power loss, and this, in turn, made MGS completely uncontrollable.
Of course, if Global Surveyor really suffered from a technical error, a logical question arises, why the engineers did not “catch” the bug before the program was sent to the spacecraft. Actually, the investigation on this topic should still be held, and only after that its official results will be announced.
Since the time of loss, several attempts have been made to identify the whereabouts of the missing probe, but all of them also ended in failure. “We announce that he is most likely dead,” said Dug McCuistion, head of the NASA Research Program, “I doubt that we will see him again.”
The Global Inspector was the oldest of the six actively operating devices in orbit or on the surface of the Red Planet. Within 10 years of work, Global Surveyor handed about 240 thousand images of the Martian surface, including the first detailed images of dust tornadoes and ravines cut in the Martian dunes with liquid water. Shortly before saying goodbye to earthlings forever, MGS has repeatedly displayed thousands of such ravines, which allowed to obtain the most reliable evidence of the presence of liquid water on Mars already in our time - at least in two cases. This discovery allows us to hope that life could once arise on Mars, at least the most primitive, the traces of which, moreover, could remain in the modern era.
Source:
Human Error May Have Doomed Mars Probe - Physorg.com
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