Professor’s Saturn Experiment Forgotten
David Atkinson spent 18 years designing an experiment for the unmanned space mission to Saturn. Now some pieces of it are lost in space. Someone forgot to turn on the instrument Atkinson needed to measure the winds on Saturn’s largest moon.
“In total, the core of our team has invested something like 80 man years on this experiment, 18 of which are mine,” Atkinson wrote. “I think right now the key lesson is this – if you’re looking for a job with instant and guaranteed success, this isn’t it.”
I thought it was that the second anntenna that duplicated many things, but which was the only one the Titan winds experiment broadcast over, failed to operate. This is the first I’ve heard that the instrument didn’t get turned on.
That would have had to have been in the code, which should have been -thoroughly- checked when ESA fixed their serious oversight of forgetting the Dopplar effect two years ago.