The Great Kersten Blunder: was it real?

[Senegoid]

In the mid-1980’s, long before there was widespread public access to the Internet (and long before there was much there other than plain-text documents), there was a document kicking around on Usenet called “Famous Bugs”. It was a compendium of smaller discussions that had been kicking around about noteworthy software bugs of the era.

You can find this document on-line to this day at http://www.discord.org/~lippard/misc/famous-bugs.txt and perhaps other places too. The above-mentioned story about the FORTRAN punctuation error mentioned there. I think some version of the hyphen story is there too.

Here’s a good one:

@Famous Bugs Document

faulk@nrl-css (who got it elsewhere)

Today, I heard good story that is a perfect example of the problems

that can arise whe the assumptions that one module makes about another
are not properly documented. (The story is from a system engineer here
whose father got it from the Smithsonian Space people.)

Aparently, the Jupiter(?) probe to mars could have programs beamed to

it which it would load in internal memory. The system engineers used this
property to make mission changes and/or corrections. After the probe had
been on Mars for a while, memory started getting tight. One of the
engineers had the realization that they no longer needed the module that
controled the landing so the space could be used for something else. The
probe was sent a new program that overwrote the landing module. As soon as
this was accomplished, all contact was lost to the probe.

Looking back into the code to find what had gone wrong, the programmers

discovered that because the landing module had to have information on
celestial navigation, some or all of the celestial navigation functions
were inclded in the landing module. Unfortunately, the antenna pointing
module also required celestial navigation information to keep the antenna
pointed at earth. To do this, it use the navigation functions in the
landing module. Overlaying the module has left the antenna pointing in some
unknown direction and all contact with the craft has been lost forever.

Fortunately, all of the mission requirements had been fulfilled so it

was no great loss. It can live on as a great example of bad design.

This document is a fun read. You can see what “famous bugs” were “going viral” in those days.

[Andy_L]

Article about “Kersten Blunder” myth Urban legend about a Venus probe lost due to unit conversion error. that cites this thread (!)

[Chronos]

Not too surprising, since Phil Plait used to post here. I guess he still lurks occasionally (Hi, Phil!).

[Moe]

Just came across this thread from Phil’s article. It seems it was Troutman’s inquiry to him that made him aware of this, and sadly not his lurking. I’d love if he was still active here, but he’s a busy bad astronomer these days.

[LSLGuy]

As so often happens, xkcd has beaten us all to the punch. Or the cite in this case.

Citogenesis

But in this case we’re now part of the citogenesis process.

[Richard_Pearse]

@Chronos

Not too surprising, since Phil Plait used to post here. I guess he still lurks occasionally (Hi, Phil!).

Even less surprising seeing as TroutMan sent the email to Phil that prompted him to write the article.

[TroutMan]

@Richard_Pearse

Even less surprising seeing as TroutMan sent the email to Phil that prompted him to write the article.

Yeah, Phil emailed me a month ago back asking if he could use my name. At least his searching had already led him to this thread, so we can all imagine he comes back to check on us every now and then.