Disaster recovery Toolkit

Story: The top 10 IT disasters of all time

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It goes on

The story about the Mars probe reminded me of a similar story. Phobos 1. a Russian probe launched towards Mars in July 1988. The following lifted from Wikipedia.

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"Phobos 1 operated nominally until an expected communications session on 2 September 1988 failed to occur. The failure of controllers to regain contact with the spacecraft was traced to an error in the software uploaded on 29 August/30 August, which had deactivated the attitude thrusters. By losing its lock on the Sun, the spacecraft could no longer properly orient its solar arrays, thus depleting its batteries.
"A natural question is "Why would a spacecraft have instructions that turn off the attitude control, normally a fatal operation?" In this case, these instructions were part of a routine used when testing the spacecraft on the ground. Normally this routine would be removed before launch. However, the software was coded in PROMs, and so removing the test code required removing and replacing the entire computer. Because of time pressure from the impending launch, engineers decided to leave the command sequence in, though it never should be used. However, a single character error in constructing an upload sequence resulted in the command executing, with subsequent loss of the spacecraft."

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While I was looking this up, I also came across this story. The Genesis probe was a craft sent into space to collect minute particles of space dust and bring them back to earth. Sadly on return, the parachute failed to deploy and the capsule slammed into the Utah desert in a spectacular way. It turns out the accelerometers designed to detect the capsule entering the atmosphere were wired backwards. thus rendering them incapable of doing their job. The mission was doomed from the moment it left the ground.

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