Professor spent 18 years building an experiment that was put onto the unmanned space mission to Saturn. Someone forgot t

[Syringer]

http://apnews.myway.com//artic...0050120/D87O3NAO0.html

With 18 years in the making, this may be the worst case of pwnage in recent memory.

 

[bapace]

Arachnid.

 

[phonemonkey]

I blame the spiders.

 

[Czar]

ouch:Q

 

[quakefiend420]

damnit...i woud be ready to kill someone...

 

[zimu]

the guy probably took a sick day, and forgot aout the code. oh well.

 

[DurocShark]

Originally posted by: quakefiend420
damnit...i woud be ready to kill someone...

In other news:

Prominent scientist in Germany, a member of the Huygens team, went crazy yesterday and started eating the fur of small animals. When asked why he responded, "MmmfgMmmmfgMmmmfg."

 

[Eli]

OMG...

Seriously though, can you imagine? I think I would cry.

 

[StageLeft]

That is just awful. I would cry and be furious and spend the next 18 years creating a laser to strap onto sharks, for my revenge.

 

[Looney]

Do you people even read articles before posting?

But the order to activate the receiver, or oscillator, for Channel A was never sent, so the entire mission operated through Channel B, which is less stable, Atkinson said.

 

[Chadder007]

In Soviet Russia....the Experiment forgets YOU!!

 

[dman]

Wonder what the experiment was trying to learn? Maybe I missed that in the article.... good thing I'm not responsible for space probes.

 

[simms]

SPIDER

 

[rh71]

so how did channel B even work if nobody turned anything on at all ? If it is on automatically, why didn't they make channel A automatic ?

Maybe what they meant was the specific "on" command for channel A was forgotten, but channel B's command was not.

Anyway, if you want something done right, ya gotta do it yourself.

 

[FoBoT]

there must be some important details left out

There is hope that some of his data survived.

"We do have Channel B data and although driven by a very poor and unstable oscillator, we may be able to get a little bit of data," he wrote.

Also, he said some of the Channel A signal reached Earth and was picked up by radio telescopes. "We now have some of this data and lots of work to do to try to catch up," he wrote.

this doesn't really make sense, we need more data

 

[Skyclad1uhm1]

According to what the news here tells the data would be channeled through a NASA probe, but someone at ESA forgot to activate one of the channels on that probe. This meant that all the data on channel A was sent to that probe, but never sent onwards to Earth. They therefor don't have all the pictures it took either, could not follow the trajectory (until someone noticed that a Dutch radiotelescope was getting clear pictures of the descent), and are missing the wind data. Even activating the channel now will not bring back the lost data.

 

[Injury]

Originally posted by: dman
Wonder what the experiment was trying to learn?

The wind patterns on Titan.

Something that no one will give a crap about for another millineum at least.

 

[GoingUp]

Thats like when the mars probe crashed because people messed up miles and kilometers....

you can never fully account for the human error

 

[artikk]

Originally posted by: Czar
ouch:Q

That hurts. Spending 18 years to build something and then have it destroyed because it wasn't turned on.:Q

 

[Bassyhead]

man that sucks

 

[silverpig]

He still got it to work...

What's really sad is the guy (I can look up names and details later) who spent his career basically building a project for Hubble. Hubble had 4 sort of modular expansion bays that you could put different equipment in. His was selected as one. When they found the problem with the main mirror, they designed CoStar, the optics that fixed Hubble's vision. They had to scrap one of the projects... Poor guy. One of my profs knows him and talks to him too. Imagine that. Your life's work up there and ready to go, then it can't see because of someone else's mistake, and then it has to be scrapped in order to fix someone else's mistake.

 

[jjones]

That sucks. Too bad for him, but I'm already over it.

 

[bluewall21]

Wow.

I blame this on human stupidity and the spiders.