Anthology of Interest

Tamara has been pestering me to write a blog entry. Thus the "engineering failures" entries below. The NEAR Shoemaker one is my favorite.

We started playing Ultimate on Tuesday nights. The first game was last week. It was the first time I had played a team sport since grade 10, which was almost nine years ago. It was also the first time I had done any significant running... since grade 10. Well, apparently cycling doesn't do a whole lot for the muscles you use while running. I can ride 80km and not feel muscle sore, but an hour and a half of Ultimate left me dead, and I was sore until Saturday or Sunday.

Today was our second day. Some how I managed to tweak a muscle or something this weekend, even though I did practically nothing physical. Running today killed, but I understood what was going on a little better and was able to make a few plays.

On the code front, my FDTD simulation Phred is coming along. I'm going to stop tool building are start simulating actual structures soon. Yay! I guess that means I should get some more work done on that thesis too....

NEAR Shoemaker suffered a nearly fatal failure on December 22nd, 1998, at 22:00 UTC, as the spacecraft was executing rendezvous burn 1 (RND1). The failure caused mission control to lose contact with the craft for 27 hours, after which NEAR was found in it's lowest safe mode, Sun-safe-rotate. Controllers were able to figure out a way to get NEAR to it's target, the asteroid 443 Eros, but with a significant time penalty and a very narrow fuel margin. The only permanent damage suffered by the craft was a contamination of the multispectral imager's optics by propellant residues.

The Mars Pathfinder mission, while widely proclaimed to be flawless, actually had a small bug in the scheduling code which handled tasks while the craft was operating on the surface of Mars. This bug caused intermittent computer resets, each of which resulted in the loss of data.

The Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) fired its main engine at 09:01 UTC, September 23rd 1999, to begin orbital insertion into Mars orbit. Telemetry with the craft was lost five minutes later as it was occulted by Mars (went behind Mars as viewed from Earth), but communication was expected to be recovered twenty minutes later when it was supposed to reappear from behind Mars. No signal from Mars Climate Orbiter would ever be heard on Earth after 09:04:52 UTC, Thursday, September 23, 1999.