Sun, Oct 17, 2004
$264 Million Thud Caused By Upside-Down Switch
First, the software was programmed in meters instead of
feet on the Mars Climate Orbiter. Now, the same contractor appears
to have installed a gravity switch backwards, causing a quarter
billion dollar spacecraft to make one heck of a hole in the
sand.
In what could well be a major blow to NASA and major contractor
Lockheed Martin, NASA investigators have determined the most likely
cause of why the Genesis spacecraft made a hole in a desert in Utah
instead of gently floating to a helicopter rescue in the sky. It
appears that a gravity switch that should have triggered the two
parachutes on the spacecraft was installed backwards, and the
Moon's gravitational field was just not quite strong enough to
trigger the opening.
The gravity switch was supposed to monitor the spacecraft's
deceleration as it entered the planet's atmosphere. At a
predetermined point, it was to have sent a signal to a timer, which
would have deployed a drogue chute. This first chute would have
slowed Genesis to a speed that would allow the safe deployment of
the second, larger parachute, which would have slowed down the
capsule to some 10 mph. At that speed, specially trained helicopter
crews would have snatched it with specially designed hooks in what
was to be a spectacular mid-air recovery.
Michael G. Ryschkewitsch, chairman of the Genesis
Mishap Investigation Board, said that since the switch was not
installed correctly, it could not have possibly worked properly.
"The board is working to confirm this proximate cause to determine
why this error happened, why it was not caught by the test program
and an extensive system of in-process and after-the-fact reviews of
the Genesis system," Ryschkewitsch said.
The Genesis spacecraft's mission was to collect samples of solar
wind from our Sun. Scientists were planning to study the material
captured on delicate wafers made of various materials in an attempt
to get a better idea of how the solar system first formed. The
retrieval using helicopters and hooks was planned that way to avoid
contamination of the samples. Instead, Genesis buried itself into
sand at almost 200 mph.
So far, scientists have managed to recover a portion of the
samples carried in the interior of the spacecraft, and are working
to recover them by cleaning the materials recovered from the
spacecraft. Investigators continue to search for other malfunctions
or manufacturing errors on Genesis that may have contributed to the
crash.
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