In the first flight of its kind within NASA’s program to explore the planet Venus in the early sixties, the flight failed due to a simple error, the engineering team successfully completed all the requirements of the flight: the vehicle’s chassis, radio communication equipment, power batteries connected to the solar panels, sensors cosmic dust, accurate calculations of the craft’s trajectory; The vehicle was programmed to carry out the mission, but one thing remained missing and was discovered too late.
After investigating the reasons for the failure of the mission called (Al-Bahar-1), it was found that the vehicle’s program was missing a dash in the source code, which was a reason to feed the vehicle with wrong calculations that derailed it. Mathematical equations executed by the vehicle’s software were written in symbolic letters, sometimes marked with a dash or a number. The role of the police was to differentiate between two symbols: the vehicle speed symbol and the average speed symbol. As a result of the confusion of the two codes, the vehicle stopped responding to the commands of the launch station, following the cause of the error that caused the failure of the mission was announced, it was said to be the most expensive police in history.
The software bug wasn’t the only one that hit the mission, 79 minutes before launch a fuse burned out in the electrical circuit, causing the launch to stop and reschedule to fix the malfunction. After the circuit was replaced, a countdown started and the vehicle successfully launched. During launch, the vehicle stopped Responding to the commands of the station, which noticed a deviation of the vehicle from the lane, and due to the failure of the correction attempts, and 6 seconds before the separation for the second stage of the launch, the command was sent to the vehicle to detonate itself.
Compared with other errors, the software error appeared as an unexpected surprise. At the beginning of the sixties, the software was in its first phase, and the concept of software engineering had not yet been, the mathematical equations implemented by the software were written by hand, and the programmer had to convert them into the program language, which is a language ( Fortran) was common at the time. The engineering experience in building other equipment was closer to the well-known engineering concept, as it is the opposite of software, tangible equipment that can be seen with the naked eye, and for that the software testing processes used were primitive and not commensurate with the project’s size and complexities.
The root cause of the software bug still exists today. After that, the NASA team played a major role in shaping the concept of software engineering, and it contributed to finding new ways to address the root cause of the problem. In the Apollo program to explore the moon, NASA adopted a new approach to software development that no one had before, and despite the success of the new approach, no one knows Why did NASA not expand its use, and over time, NASA’s contributions did not stop in developing new ways to overcome software problems, whether at the development or testing level, but a number of methodologies that were developed at NASA and succeeded in it failed to achieve the spread they deserve.
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