For 10 years, the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft beamed back over 240,000 pictures, including the first detailed images of swirling dust devils and gullies before abruptly falling silent last year.
Now, according to an Associated Press report released this past week, NASA is investigating whether incorrect software commands may be to blame for the loss of the Global Surveyor's images.
John McNamee, deputy director of solar system exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a recent speech, said a preliminary investigation points to incorrect software commands uploaded to the spacecraft in June.
The software was aimed at improving the spacecraft's flight processors. Instead, bad commands may have overheated the battery and forced the spacecraft into safe mode, McNamee told scientists gathered Tuesday in Virginia to plan for future Mars missions.
Records show there was an incorrect loading of software, which could have resulted in a cooling radiator for a battery being pointed at the sun, McCuistion said.
"It may have overheated and lost the battery, which then would not allow us to have adequate power to operate the spacecraft," McCuistion told AP Radio.
I've been saying for some time that the growing complexity of today's IT infrastructures has made the typical change management process too difficult for humans to adequately manage. We need to turn to automated solutions to help us accurately predict the potential impact of a change BEFORE deploying the change into a live, production environment.
What more can I say when a simple software upgrade appears to have taken such a valuable piece of technology permanently off-line?
Clearly, human attempts to accurately predict and manage configuation changes in today's complex IT environments is too difficult....even for rocket scientists!
