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| Professor's Saturn Experiment Forgotten |
| 2005-01-21 |
| David Atkinson spent 18 years designing an experiment for the unmanned space mission to Saturn. Now some pieces of it are lost in space. Someone forgot to turn on the instrument Atkinson needed to measure the winds on Saturn's largest moon. "The story is actually fairly gruesome," the University of Idaho scientist said in an e-mail from Germany, the headquarters of the European Space Agency. "It was human error - the command to turn the instrument on was forgotten..." I thought I'd heard a loud kind of "ARRRGGGHH!-y sound the other day. |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #7 ... ya know, I'd heard that they had lost some of the data.. a lot of it, even.. this would explain it. IIUC, they screwed up bigtime, and he wasn't the only one affected. |
| Posted by: Dishman 2005-01-21 7:34:51 PM |
| #6 I'll bet we wouldn't have fucked it up, doc. Call me. |
| Posted by: Halliburton: Super Secret Up To No Good Space Division 2005-01-21 6:05:34 PM |
| #5 Commands to spacecraft this far away are carefully scripted & computerized, since you don't get a second chance. And they had years for simulation & review. Seems to me the onus is on the ESA for not catching any flaws. |
| Posted by: PBMcL 2005-01-21 4:28:52 PM |
| #4 Or a new cucumber regulation. |
| Posted by: Mrs. Davis 2005-01-21 4:27:14 PM |
| #3 They money could have been better spent on the homeless. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-01-21 4:24:16 PM |
| #2 Euros just forgot to turn on experiment from Aryan Nation professor...riiiiight. |
| Posted by: Mrs. Davis 2005-01-21 1:51:27 PM |
| #1 Clearly Bush's fault. The guy who was supposed to turn on the experiment was consumed by worry about Bush's rejection of the Kyoto accords. |
| Posted by: Matt 2005-01-21 1:40:50 PM |