[X] My Assistant

[odave]

There are valid points on both sides of the discussion.

From Oberg's article, it sounds like they were trying to "time it":

Kyodo quoted Kawaguchi as saying the mission team tried to make sure that the deployment signal would arrive while Hayabusa was descending. For some reason, this did not work.

Just relying on timing for things to happen is bad-bad-bad when doing real-time process control. They certainly blew it on the Minerva release software not having some kind of interlock (if indeed they didn't have one - I don't think we know that for sure - but if they did, it was buggy). They probably short-changed the software development process, either in design reviews or testing. That is consistent with my experience with similarly constrained software development efforts, (Japanese or otherwise), which tends to be "Just In Time", or rather, "Just Too Late".

But, the loss of a little technology test probe pales in comparison to the loss of MCO due to the english vs metric unit thing. In my opinion, that blunder was embarassing and unforgivable. I'd give the guys responsible for that one a lot more time in the hairshirt than the JAXA guys who forgot to put in the software interlock.

Restating what others have already said, Hayabusa has returned a lot science without Minerva. Even if the sample collection & return fails, it will still beat MCO, which never had a chance to return anything.

Yes, JAXA has had plenty of opportunities to learn from failures in the past, and they should take a hard look at what went wrong at all points of this mission. They should also be congratulated on what they have accomplished so far.


Edit: Reworded the end of my second paragraph, as the former version was unfair to Japanese software developers in general.

[Jeff7]

But, the loss of a little technology test probe pales in comparison to the loss of MCO due to the english vs metric unit thing. In my opinion, that blunder was embarassing and unforgivable. I'd give the guys responsible for that one a lot more time in the hairshirt than the JAXA guys who forgot to put in the software interlock.

Or Genesis. I seem to remember reading somewhere that the gravity sensor that would have told the parachute to deploy was put in upside down.


Ah, found a link. Here.

The Genesis space capsule that crashed into the Utah desert last month failed because four pencil stub-size gravity switches designed to trigger the release of the spacecraft's parachutes were installed backward, NASA officials said yesterday.

Oops.
Also of note, this was after MCO "buried," as Robin Williams put it.

[djellison]

Well the TDRS sat's launch with deployable HGA's - but I'm not sure if their design would be applicable for deep space applications instead of GEO.

Doug