These folks that design and run these experiments must have nerves of steel.
You know that feeling when you have a file server that is half way around the world and all the sudden it's gone unresponsive? Then you have to start a recovery process with on-site people, etc? The dread? The uncertainty?
Now think of a principle scientist that quite possibly has devoted their entire life's academic work to one of these experiments, and something like this happens. From concept to funding to launch to all the billions of dollars to all the math and luck and other stuff that must go right. I don't know if I could do it.
And then it comes down to one damn tiny pin or something and all could be lost.
It would be like spending 20 years configuring a server just right in a specific manner, deploying it, and it's taken out for ever because of a typo in code somewhere - and it's all gone. Poof.
Indeed. I'm a rover driver & arm operator on Curiosity and there have been a few sandy patches where things were a little ... touch and go. I often think: what if I made a bad call, and my drive ended the mission? Even with a mission that's been operating for more than 10 years, it would be awful: there are hundreds of people involved, including scientists who have been planning investigations for the rover to conduct along our journey over the next few years. I would feel terrible if it was my fault that we never got to their research site of interest.
But then I remember: I'm not an airline pilot. I'm not a surgeon. Yes, my decisions matter, but this is not the highest-stakes job out there, not by a long shot.
Does it actually include touch and go like driving with the driver as decision maker? I expected that every move would be scrutinized by a team of specialists?
In a nutshell, one rover planner (that's what drivers / arm operators are called) writes the sequence of commands, a second rover planner checks it and then walks through it line-by-line out loud with another ~2 rover planners watching. Then the second rover planner walks through the whole thing again with many other teams listening in and asking questions.
The first rover planner also consults with a surface properties scientist during development of the drive command sequence.
So, if things go wrong it's never really any single person's fault. But still, that first rover planner drafting the initial version of the command sequence bears a fair amount of responsibility.
Just wanted to say that this is the kind comment chain I come to HN for, when a Mars rover driver comes in with a relevant and amazing anecdote. Absolutely love this. Thank you foobarbecue!
The autonomous driving capabilities on Curiosity (known as "guarded" and "autonav" modes) are quite limited and haven't been used recently. They don't work in rough terrain, and we've been in rough terrain for a while now. This means that we can only drive to the end of the 3D meshes generated from images from the previous parking spot. When the terrain is acceptable for autonav we can usually rely on orbital imagery and drive farther.
We do set limits on suspension angles and tilt of the rover. So we'll say "stop driving if you are tilted more than 20 degrees," "stop driving if your differential angle goes above 7 degrees," etc.
Everyone who ships hardware products has this problem. You don't want to recall thousands of items because you forgot to add a capacitor in your circuit.
I disagree, I do both, and a modern ECU hardware can be extremely complex .. more so than its software.
This is because the hardware needs to meet a stack of conflicting specifications and standards for EMC, robustness, etc. Things need to work at a wide range of temperatures -40degC to 150degC.
Optimising for one standard or parameter causes all your other calibration to go out of whack. Adding a protection element to the circuit can itself fail and be the reason that the circuit fails. At times it can be like the Jenga tower ready to topple over.
Modern standards like ISO 26262 make it even more complicated because now we have to calculate and add up the failure probabilities of every single resistor and capacitor to find the whole-circuit failure probability, and in some applications we would need to prove less than 10 FIT (10 per trillion hours). Usually this can’t be reached without adding redundant components, and then maintaining the document trail to explain why they exist and can't be removed.
And suppose you need to change a component in the design .. you have to find something to do with the 10,000 units of the old component that you bought a year ago before the design was finished because it was on back order for 100 weeks.
I have had feet in both worlds. I started as an EE, and have since moved to pure software.
One of the cool things about writing drivers and firmware, is you can do real-world damage. I’ve blown up $40,000 RF scanners (in 1980s dollars), because I accidentally reversed the position of a switch.
Also, if you think hardware systems are simpler than software, I invite you to open up a modern DSLR (not mirrorless) camera. I worked for a major camera manufacturer for many years, and saw some crazy complex stuff.
But nothing I ever did can hold a candle to the OP.
I think senior engineers should always have good "knowledge gained is proportional to equipment damaged" stories, they're great for helping juniors through their own "learning experiences". (At my current startup, the one about me and the founder/CTO figuring out how to use an API by experimenting on our only robot arm, resulting in slamming a $30k arm into a concrete wall (mmm, polar coordinates) is great for getting across "you'll be more careful next time, because look, really, there will be a next time!")
Does anybody know what the intended use of these "non explosive actuator"s were? Are they resettable? Does using them for freeing the antenna degrade another part of the mission?
I _think_ they're often nitinol, i.e., shape-memory metal. Nitinol can be hot-formed, cooled, then formed a further limited amount. When reheated, they will return to their hot-formed shape.
I don't think a shape memory alloy would provide a shock. I suspect they are solenoids(vs explosive bolts) used to detach the vehicle from it's mounting plate on the rocket. and the engineers as they went down the list trying increasingly wild ideas to get the antenna to deploy reached "fire the release solenoids, and hope it shakes the antenna pin in the correct way".
It did, so slow clap for the engineers for saving a very expensive science experiment remotely from billions of miles away. well done.
The French fans of American MMA express their appreciation with golf or tennis claps. A contrast in technique and style between American and French MMA is seen in the Jon Jones vs Cyril Gane heavy weight fight.
Back on topic, the release mechanism jams every now and again across the probes sent to deep space. Hope the engineers are given the window of opportunity to solve this category of problem once and for all by business-ops. The release of the JWST antenna while at the moment of sparkly reflections in the sunshine looked real strong.
Or it could be a PCM pin-puller system: basically paraffin is heated and while it liquifies, it will slightly expand and push a pin that will trigger the release.
This points to an ability to shake, like biological entities can shake to throw off unwanted things or stretch out body parts, as a feature that should be designed into future devices.
Yes, especially since these machines need to resist vibration anyways at launch. A vibration motor might be a good inclusion, although it could be the required rotating mass busts some mass budgets. A more complex second option could be a small cubesat which tags along and can bump into or poke at some components.
It is well-known, especially after the film came out, that NASA engineers and staff were consciously tempting fate when they scheduled the Apollo 13 launch for 13 minutes after the hour. Of course, up until that point in history, it was customary to omit the 13th floor in buildings and to omit the 1300 block in city street planning, among other things. So it was a rather "progressive" move for NASA to even suggest that they not skip directly from Apollo 12 to Apollo 14.
I do not rightly recall, but I believe that the film portrayed other ways they poked fun at superstition in a really callous and cavalier manner. So is it any surprise that they were rewarded with a disastrous and life-threatening mission? Hmm.
We know what caused the Apollo 13 incident and it had nothing to do with the number or date time of launch. A wire shorted and caused a fire. We learned not to use teflon inside oxygen tanks.
Letting superstition impact decision making of a billion dollar project would be criminal incompetence.
It makes you wonder if there is some cause-and-effect here. Being cavalier about the number 13, which could have been either stressful or performative for at least some people, could have affected the way they approach other work.
What I mean is, if you start saying "what could go wrong?" to numerology, maybe you start saying it about other things.
I'm not saying that I think anyone did anything wrong. But psychology is weird sometimes, and unintended consequences abound...
In my experience real problems from both are not about the specific day or date or numerology, but about the psychology behind the choice - which inevitably causes problems.
With Friday pushes, someone is inevitably in a rush to get something out despite the risks and ignoring that most folks are going to be checked out and unavailable regardless of what they say (because most people are working M-F). Which is a recipe for disaster. If the company has a shifted schedule or something going on, the same danger could apply on a Monday, but Friday’s are a problem 99% of the time.
With something like ‘the 13th’, it could be someone intentionally picking things that have no obvious rational reason to be a problem but that make some people uneasy and worried for non-rational reasons.
While most of the time that isn’t a problem, sometimes there actually is a problem there, we just haven’t been able to figure it out rationally yet, let alone provide a useful counter measure. And people feeling uneasy, even if they aren’t rationally aware of it causes problems on its own. We tend to go where our mind visualizes we will end up.
After all, it is generally a bad idea to be walking under ladders or scaffolding without a hard hat for instance, and broken mirrors are dangerous. Just not for 7 years, assuming one has a vacuum and cleans it up well enough after.
And if people are uneasy about something, why intentionally aim for it? Why not avoid it? Or at least just ignore it.
Assuming there isn’t some huge pressing benefit to doing the thing that is making people uneasy anyway, which I’m struggling to imagine why it would be important to hit all the numerology ‘bad numbers’ in Apollo’s case for instance.
The title sounds bad, like the antenna broke off, but the article explains that the antenna was stuck in its folded position, and they got it to break free and deploy into the correct position.
> To try to shift the pin, they shook Juice using its thrusters, then they warmed Juice with sunlight. Every day the RIME antenna was showing signs of movement, but no full release.
> On 12 May RIME was finally jolted into life when the flight control team fired a mechanical device called a ‘non-explosive actuator’ (NEA), located in the jammed bracket. This delivered a shock that moved the pin by a matter of millimetres and allowed the antenna to unfold.
TLDR: They finally pressed the unstick the antenna button.
Are these efforts scientifically-driven or necessity-driven?
Are we taking it as a given that humanity will not last here on earth, thus we NEED to find other habitable planets?
Is it because it’s already too late here?
Is it because humanity has embedded into itself, a socio-economic pattern that is completely unsustainable and we are fundamentally unable to reach consensus on how to pull ourselves out of the nosedive?
I'm a human and I'm part of humanity, but I'm under no obligation to take orders from it, or operate with it as part of a forced consensus. What you seem to be arguing for is a complete tyranny of human creativity and experimentation to be lorded over by economists and lawyers.
We're doing it because it's cool and we might learn something. If that's not good enough, then I'm not sure what type of world you'd actually like to live in.
What's with everyone feeling a need to shoehorn every possible issue into an either this or that frame? The world is not made of binary yes/no questions - it feels like it says something about the limitations of the person asking the question.
Both. It is scientifically driven, but scientific exploration itself is a necessity.
Not necessarily because we will all die if we don't do it (though there is a bit of that), but because curiosity is what makes us human. It is as necessary as heroin is for an addict, except that unlike heroin, it is an addiction that lead us to great things. If we stopped doing that, I wouldn't even want to call the resulting species "human".
You know that feeling when you have a file server that is half way around the world and all the sudden it's gone unresponsive? Then you have to start a recovery process with on-site people, etc? The dread? The uncertainty?
Now think of a principle scientist that quite possibly has devoted their entire life's academic work to one of these experiments, and something like this happens. From concept to funding to launch to all the billions of dollars to all the math and luck and other stuff that must go right. I don't know if I could do it.
And then it comes down to one damn tiny pin or something and all could be lost.
It would be like spending 20 years configuring a server just right in a specific manner, deploying it, and it's taken out for ever because of a typo in code somewhere - and it's all gone. Poof.
Nightmare fuel.