"Oops ... butterfingers."

[unixronin]

Remember the DART mission?  Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology?  The spacecraft that was supposed to make an unmanned rendezvous with a dead military satellite, but ended up drifting away from it with its engines shut down, and NASA wouldn't really cop to why?

Well, they copped to it yesterday.  Apparently DART's sensors misreported its speed, its position, and its remaining fuel, with the result that rather than performing a rendezvous with the target satellite and circling it, DART ... well ... sort of "crashed into it" at about five feet per second (about 3.5mph), nudging it into a higher orbit in the process, then shut down its engines mistakenly believing itself to be out of fuel.

Investigators also raised issues with the mission's management style, saying that lack of training and experience caused the DART design team to shun expert advice.  They also found that internal checks and balances were inadequate in uncovering the mission's shortcomings.

NASA will not release the full 70-page report, citing "sensitive information protected by International Traffic in Arms Regulations".  I don't know about you, but to me, that justification raises more questions than it answers.  Was there perhaps something on the target satellite, something that figured into the rendezvous mission, which, under international space treaties, wasn't supposed to be there...?

Comments

[plutosonium.livejournal.com]

ITAR covers a world of crap. I'd assume it's more like there's details in the software they didn't want made public because it falls under some proprietary, don't give it to people so they can use it to program their own satellites, kind of stuff.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It does indeed, and a lot of what it covers is really stupid put-the-genie-back-in-the-bottle stuff trying to prevent "sensitive technologies" from being exported to people who already have them.