In a message dated 4/3/2007 19:29:25 Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
An Arianne 5 rocket had to be destroyed with its cargo when it veered off course because of a faulty conversion from English to metric in the guidance software. What a bummer! I hate it when that happens!!! Hi Didier, actually unless there was a second explosion I don't know about, the first Arianne-5 proto-rocket exploded due to a variable parameter overflow (missing saturation check) in a calculation. The conversion problem you mentioned happened on a Mars mission. There was a lengthy and technically detailed report in the German CT' magazine, it said the designer of the routine proved extensively that the routine would never overflow on Arianne 4 due to it's flight configuration, and in fact it never did. He left the company, and the guys who followed just copy-pasted his code into the Arianne 5 flight software were the code did overflow due to missing saturation tests and a different flight configuration. BTW: I didn't expect my email about our strange US units to start such a lengthy discussion on the board... bye, Said ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list time-nuts@febo.com https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts