Perhaps the 84 second burn overflowed the integer (2^6) and was caught by a 2^7s check (127s)

  • Lil' Bobby Tables@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    You know what this reminds me of? The processing failure that killed Phobos 2 right before it reached Mars.

    As I recall, the craft lost attitude control and didn’t have a safe mood to orient it toward the sun; so it burned through its batteries making adjustments in a few hours. It had two landing probes on board that never got to be used. So, no emergency backup systems. Never heard from it again.

    Of course this was 1989, and most people only had a vague idea what programmers did; but it still feels like a serious and kind of nebulous oversight.