On Thursday, 24 November 2016 at 20:22:00 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
On 24.11.2016 20:49, qznc wrote:
Although, the article [0] does not say that literally, it
sounds like an
integer overflow:
After trawling through mountains of data, the European Space
Agency
said Wednesday that while much of the mission went according
to plan,
a computer that measured the rotation of the lander hit a
maximum
reading, knocking other calculations off track.
That led the navigation system to think the lander was much
lower than
it was, causing its parachute and braking thrusters to be
deployed
prematurely.
"The erroneous information generated an estimated altitude
that was
negative—that is, below ground level," the ESA said in a
statement.
That is why we need CheckedInt, folks. Reminder End. ;)
[0]
http://phys.org/news/2016-11-glitch-blamed-european-mars-lander.html
I don't think overflow is what happened. Rather, the
statistical model they used to filter the sensor data didn't
match reality. It put too much trust into a malfunctioning
sensor -- I assume the sensor readings were extremely
implausible.
Hey, sounds suspicously similar to Ariane 5 explosion. Does ESA
not learn from its errors or am I only reading too much in it
(probably)?
