"Software that was supposed to point the spacecraft solar panels toward the sun instead pointed them 180 degrees away from the sun. In addition, the panel found "many erroneous on-board fault management actions" that, taken together with the solar panel pointing error, "caused the Lunar Trailblazer failure.""
"When a complicated system fails, it's usually more than one thing that takes it down. You get a cascading series of a couple of different failures that result in, ultimately, the bad outcome that you're investigating to start with."
"Lockheed Martin built the low-cost Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft. The NASA panel says the company did not properly test the solar panel pointing software before launch. Mission managers might have been able to fix that problem, but other software issues made it at first difficult, and ultimately impossible, to fix the pointing error."
The Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft launched on February 26, 2025, with a mission to map lunar water but lost contact one day after launch. A NASA review panel determined the $72 million mission failed due to a critical software error that oriented the solar panels away from the sun instead of toward it. Additional on-board fault management errors compounded the problem, preventing mission managers from correcting the initial pointing mistake. Lockheed Martin, the spacecraft builder, failed to properly test the solar panel pointing software before launch. Multiple cascading failures rather than a single error led to the mission's loss, a pattern seen in previous failed spacecraft missions.
Read at www.npr.org
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]