Good morning, Whitewater
I don’t know of any public, municipal meetings for the City of Whitewater today. Chin up — life will go on, some way, some how…
In American history on this date, the story of a small mistake that doomed Mariner I on July 22, 1962, as Wired recounts:
When The New York Times copy desk lets a typo slip through, it’s embarrassing but no one gets hurt. When NASA programmers screw up, the consequences are a tad more dramatic, not to mention expensive. In this case, a “missing hyphen” in code forces mission control to abort the launch of the unmanned Mariner 1 probe less than five minutes after liftoff.
Mariner 1 was intended to collect a variety of scientific data about Venus during a flyby of our closest neighbor in the solar system.
What caused the snafu remains unclear to this day, owing to the welter of conflicting reports — both official and unofficial — that appeared in the wake of the mission’s failure.
One of the official reports, issued by the Mariner 1 Post-Flight Review Board, concluded that a dropped hyphen in coded computer instructions resulted in incorrect guidance signals being sent to the spacecraft. The review board specifically refers to a “hyphen,” although other sources also refer to an “overbar transcription error” and even to a misplaced decimal point….
Such was the erratic nature of rocketry in the early ’60s that a backup probe, Mariner 2, was waiting in the wings. Nearly five weeks later, it launched cleanly, and it completed Mariner 1’s mission in December.
Moral of the story? Programmers shouldn’t double-check code. They should triple-check it.
(Mariner I rendering from NASA.)
Here’s today’s almanac —
| Almanac | ||
|---|---|---|
| Wednesday, July 22, 2009 | Sunrise | Sunset |
| Official Time | 05:35 AM | 08:26 PM |
| Civil Twilight | 05:02 AM | 08:59 PM |
| Tomorrow | 05:36 AM | 08:25 PM |
| Tomorrow will be: | 2 minutes shorter | |
| Amount of sunlight: | 14h 51m | |
| Amount of daylight: | 15h 57m | |
| Moon phase: | New Moon | |