[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.

[Guest_Sedna_*]

I think Genesis worked okay, but failed in a very important point: to get the samples back flawlessly!! All the thing with the helicopters was "funny" while the proble hitted the ground, as a scientist I would have just dropped the whole thing into the rubbish bin (what a pain!). Now, they are trying to "save something" while they should know by now many conclusions about the samples...

[elakdawalla]

I think Genesis worked okay, but failed in a very important point: to get the samples back flawlessly!! All the thing with the helicopters was "funny" while the proble hitted the ground, as a scientist I would have just dropped the whole thing into the rubbish bin (what a pain!). Now, they are trying to "save something" while they should know by now many conclusions about the samples...

I think the scientists feel thankful every day that their samples survived an event that should have destroyed all hopes for any successful result from the mission. The Huygens Doppler Wind Experiment scientists feel the same way. It's heartbreaking to consider what they could have had, if their receiver had only been turned on aboard Cassini. Yet, thanks to some incredibly hard work, they do have a data set, and one that's sufficient to accomplish most of the stated goals of their experiment (though of course not everything they could have done if everything had gone right). I am sure the Genesis folks, while feeling rueful about the arduous task that they face, are eternally grateful that they've got data at all.

By the way, there are both talk and poster sessions of Genesis mission results planned for the 2005 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

--Emily

[Guest_Sedna_*]

By the way, there are both talk and poster sessions of Genesis mission results planned for the 2005 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

--Emily

Good to hear, we'll have then the chance to discuss and learn with that folks

[The Messenger]

Good to hear, we'll have then the chance to discuss and learn with that folks

It is good to hear that most of the samples are/have been recovered. So what is the sun made out of, besides that light stuff we can see?

The Utah- Nevada Desert that Genesis crashed in, is a remarkable area for artifacts. Here is a great story:

A few years ago, my (former) wife was running a desert field survey near the Utah/Nevada boarder with a crew of archeological techs, and came across a crashed UFO.

No, really, an honest to God, saucer-like vessal about the size of a motor boat that had pancaked and broken into the sand. They were about a mile away (and spread out, because they were surveying), but she was closest, and her crew kept asking over the headphones what in the hell it was, and looking through the bonoculars the only thing that she could say is that 'It looks like nothing other than a crashed UFO'.

She promised the crew they would go back and check it out, after lunch, but that proved unnecessary: One of the marques on a local hotel said "Welcome: Crew of Independence Day." Nice prop. By the time they returned, the 'ship' had disappeared and returned to Hollywood...or hidden in Area 51, if you are into that kind of thing.

[ljk4-1]

It is good to hear that most of the samples are/have been recovered. So what is the sun made out of, besides that light stuff we can see?

The Utah- Nevada Desert that Genesis crashed in, is a remarkable area for artifacts. Here is a great story:

A few years ago, my (former) wife was running a desert field survey near the Utah/Nevada boarder with a crew of archeological techs, and came across a crashed UFO.

No, really, an honest to God, saucer-like vessal about the size of a motor boat  that had pancaked and broken into the sand. They were about a mile away (and spread out, because they were surveying), but she was closest, and her crew kept asking over the headphones what in the hell it was, and looking through the bonoculars the only thing that she could say is that 'It looks like nothing other than a crashed UFO'.

She promised the crew they would go back and check it out, after lunch, but that proved unnecessary: One of the marques on a local hotel said "Welcome: Crew of Independence Day." Nice prop. By the time they returned, the 'ship' had disappeared and returned to Hollywood...or hidden in Area 51, if you are into that kind of thing.

Some of the reasons given for the infamous Roswell saucer stories included the air drop tests of the Voyager and Viking Mars probe heat shields in the 1960s and 1970s, which looked an awful lot like a typical saucer-shaped UFO.

See the images at the end of this page:

http://www.af.mil/library/roswell/

The Roswell Air Force Base has one of the actual Voyager heat shields on display, or at least they did when I saw it in 1995.

[Bob Shaw]

The Roswell Air Force Base has one of the actual Voyager heat shields on display, or at least they did when I saw it in 1995.

Now that's a helluva link - I didn't know *any* Voyager hardware was built, let alone flown (that's the *original* Voyager, chaps - the twin-payload Saturn V Mars mission!).

Bob Shaw