NASA – Bad software may have doomed Mars orbiter
NASA is forming an internal investigative board to look into why the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter stopped responding to commands in November, the agency announced Wednesday. The announcement came a day after one of the space agencys senior Mars program officials told a public gathering of scientists here that faulty software uploaded to the spacecraft last summer may have doomed the spacecraft.
We think that the failure was due to a software load we sent up in June of last year, NASA Watch quoted McNamee as saying. This software tried to synch up two flight processors. Two addresses were incorrect two memory addresses were overwritten. As the geometry evolved, we drove the [solar] arrays against a hard stop and the spacecraft went into safe mode. The radiator for the battery pointed at the sun, the temperature went up, and battery failed. But this should be treated as preliminary.”
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