Cascade of errors ended space mission, inquiry finds

摘要

An official inquiry has blamed a computer-programming error for the loss of the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft in November 2006. In June 2006, new instructions sent to the spacecraft about what to do in certain special contingencies were mistakenly stored in the wrong memory address. Five months later, this led to a problem with the spacecraft's solar arrays. In responding to the problem, the spacecraft repositioned itself in such a way that one of its batteries overheated, while at the same time its main communication antenna turned away from Earth. The combination proved fatal.