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Working the Challenge: Two Paths to First Flight on Mars
- anonymousiam 6y agoI'm glad they got this resolved. Having done a lot of embedded spacecraft software, I was curious about what the initial problem was. From the (scarce) information I could find, I had assumed the spin test shutdown occurred because of some kind of limit check -- possibly related to different motor drive currents in a thin atmosphere. My initial assumption was wrong and I read somewhere else that it was a watchdog timeout issue. This is pretty surprising to me because, unless there has been some sort of hardware failure, the watchdog should not cause problems like this because the software should have been thoroughly tested. Now NASA is saying they've uncovered a flight software problem and have a fix, so I guess they somehow managed to upset the flight software with their very first scenario. It does not inspire a lot of confidence in the NASA flight software QA process, but at least they have the ability to do an interplanetary software patch.