Eeep, one's typing hit the skids again (probably because while I was finishing it someone was talking at me about the Work I'm Paid For) ... please mentally delete everything before "Part of the problem here" and change the number of episodes with Blake to 5 (the argument still stands, however :-).
Wasn't there a space mission that went up in a million-dollar explosion because someone typed a minus instead of a plus sign?
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Sally Manton wrote:
Wasn't there a space mission that went up in a million-dollar explosion because someone typed a minus instead of a plus sign?
Really? They needed some error-trapping routines, didn't they?
Mistral
On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, Sally Manton wrote:
Wasn't there a space mission that went up in a million-dollar explosion because someone typed a minus instead of a plus sign?
Yup. Phobos 1, a Soviet Mars mission. (Though I doubt the cost was anything like as low as a million dollars.)
There's a brief discussion of various such cases at
http://web.tampabay.rr.com/dneufeld/sftrel.html
Iain
Iain wrote:
On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, Sally Manton wrote:
Wasn't there a space mission that went up in a million-dollar explosion because someone typed a minus instead of a plus sign?
Yup. Phobos 1, a Soviet Mars mission. (Though I doubt the cost was anything like as low as a million dollars.)
Has the metric/imperial thing ever happened, or is that just on "Brazil"?
Una
"Sally" == Sally Manton smanton@hotmail.com writes:
Wasn't there a space mission that went up in a million-dollar explosion because someone typed a minus instead of a plus sign?
Mariner 1 had to be destroyed shortly after launch since it's guidance algorithm was wrong. The algorithm was wrong because of a mistranslation from typed formula to handwritten formula. Not quite a typo, but close.
"Sally" == Sally Manton smanton@hotmail.com writes:
Wasn't there a space mission that went up in a million-dollar explosion because someone typed a minus instead of a plus sign?
"A classic confusion between metric and imperial (English) measurement units has been reported as the probable cause of the loss of the $125M Mars Climate Orbiter." http://metrologyforum.tm.agilent.com/news19991020.shtml Lockheed Martin used imperial measurements, Jet Propulsion Labs used metric. Not quite a plus or minus sign, but also pretty close. And way more expensive.
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Calle Dybedahl -
Iain Coleman -
Mistral -
Rhonda L. Stroud -
Sally Manton -
Una McCormack