Re: ESA flubs Titan Landing show

From: Lee (FredFlintstone46_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 01/18/05 

Date: 18 Jan 2005 08:08:52 -0800

I have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of Cassinni at Saturn, and
Huygens at Titan for the past 2 years. I've read and re-read every
scrap of information available (which was very little prior to SOI). I
stayed up and cheered with JPL live on NASA TV when Cassinni
successfully sent back images of the rings during orbit insertion. I
feel a fondness for Caroline Porkos (sp?), and the obvious enthusiasm
that she portrayed live as the images came in real time.
However, I'm still waiting for images from Titan. Yes, I've seen the 3
images released, but where are the rest? I've heard complaints about
the media's short attention span, but ESA is going to miss the whole
"span" if they don't get the information out quickly.

I'm amazed at what ESA (and NASA) were able to accomplish with this
mission, it was absolutely phenomenal. However, as a computer
programmer I'm sickened by the fact that overlooked code is at fault
for the loss of 1/2 of the data.
I guess the thing that really upsets me is to look at the difference
between the hardware and the software. The hardware had to travel
millions of miles, perform several tricky gravity slingshot maneuvers,
and survive falling to the surface of an unexplored world where we
didn't (until recently) know what the atmosphere was made of. The
hardware had to record sound, take Doppler readings, sample the
atmosphere and take hundreds of images, all while plummeting towards
the ground. The hardware had to establish communications to a moving
satellite thousands of miles overhead thru a hazy opaque atmosphere.
The software had to... transmit and store data. It's a common and
mundane task for software to handle every day, one that could have been
corrected up to 3 weeks ago. Yet due to a lack of emphasis on this
critical (and apparently non-redundant) system, the science of this
HUGE accomplishment is cut in half.
So as to fend off the negative response to this post, let me say again
HURAY for what was accomplished. Congrats to ESA and NASA. But,
someone needs to fire the software engineer responsible for this
monumental failure caused by a trivial error.

And oh yeah, why weren't there redundancies in both the command code,
and transmission channels?

Lee

PS I've just found these images of Titan. I don't know how this site
got them, while ESA's site doesn't, but...
http://mars.lyle.org/titan/

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