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It would be nice if Opportunity is one day able to examine the wreckage of its descent stage.

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I wonder if Oppy or the other satellites will be able to image the decent.

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It would be nice if Opportunity is one day able to examine the wreckage of its descent stage.

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Well, Opportunity didn't exactly have a descent stage, as it was contained in a conical protective shell with a heat shield on one end and the lander portion inside. It did take images of its lander platform that had the airbags after the rover drove off of it. It also did manage to find its heat shield and examine it in some detail, as the heat shield landed next to Endurance crater. The backshell portion with the parachute landed 425 meters to the southwest of Eagle crater where the lander platform now rests, so I seriously doubt the rover will backtrack a whopping 20 kilometers just to take a look at its backshell. Clear skies to you.

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Oh wow. I must have wrote that on little sleep and no caffeine. I meant to say Curiosity. It would be nice if it can examine its descent stage at a later point in the mission.

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They usually fail much earlier in the development process, without ever being implemented. This one made it well past that stage.

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It would be nice if Opportunity is one day able to examine the wreckage of its descent stage.

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Well, Opportunity didn't exactly have a descent stage, as it was contained in a conical protective shell with a heat shield on one end and the lander portion inside. It did take images of its lander platform that had the airbags after the rover drove off of it. It also did manage to find its heat shield and examine it in some detail, as the heat shield landed next to Endurance crater. The backshell portion with the parachute landed 425 meters to the southwest of Eagle crater where the lander platform now rests, so I seriously doubt the rover will backtrack a whopping 20 kilometers just to take a look at its backshell. Clear skies to you.

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Oh wow. I must have wrote that on little sleep and no caffeine. I meant to say Curiosity. It would be nice if it can examine its descent stage at a later point in the mission.

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Funny, I took it to mean Opportunity examining the wreckage of Curiosity. I sarcastically thought, "hey, thats a good attitude".

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They usually fail much earlier in the development process, without ever being implemented. This one made it well past that stage.

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Nevertheless, recall December 1957 attempt to launch the first US satellite in which the rocket blew up on the launchpad shortly after ignition, due to a blunder in the FORTRAN code in the mission control software. I can't recall offhand exactly what the blunder was, but it was explained in one of the programming classes I took a long time ago, and I recall how embarassingly elementary the bug was. Software compilers and debugging processes have become far better and more sophisticated since then (as have programming languages and practices), but OTOH software is immensely more complex and voluminous, with lots more opportunities for subtle bugs to creep in that elude efforts to test for all possible problematic contingencies.

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I can't find much evidence of this ever being just a computer problem. The exact cause of the TV3 (Vanguard-1) launch failure in December of 1957 was never really pin-pointed to any degree, but the most common reason given was that low fuel tank pressure during the start procedure allowed some of the burning fuel in the combustion chamber to leak into the fuel system through the injector head before full propellant pressure was obtained from the turbopump. The engine lost thrust and, after rising just a few feet, the rocket settled back onto the launch pad and exploded. The second attempt to launch the Vanguard satellite in February of 1958 also failed due to a control system failure 57 seconds after launch, causing the vehicle to break up. If you want an example of a simple "bug" causing a spacecraft failure, we need only look to the Mars Climate Explorer orbiter which was sent too close to Mars and burned up in the atmosphere due to a simple numerical error (English instead of Metric units). Clear skies to you.

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