When you think that ten fingers is enough to count the number of tick marks and you find you need your toes also, problems can arise. The mission was a year and a half, so the Moon was seen many times and data averaged. The scientists missed some data but that happened if there was a break in coverage from the Deep Space Network. No big deal, you just looked at my 5 minute old web site data repeated every 5 minutes for the time that no new data arrived. I seem to remember this happened again during the mission but now they knew what was wrong. It seems that the counter could not handle the size of the count for how long the spacecraft had been running. After they consulted with the Primary Investigators it was decided to send commands to Lunar Prospector to reset the buffer counters. Nothing noted, until they looked at their data stream. I asked the operators if anything was wrong. Normally the numbers and letters would be different as different data came in.
(no one wanted my PC anywhere near their workstation data.) I came in one morning and the hexadecimal display of a portion of the data stream was fixed, not changing. My PC looked at a file of data that had been transferred to a Digital Corporation Micro VAX from the secure network the operators looked at. I remember working with the data from the Lunar Prospector mission where I was looking at a data stream that was about five minutes old.
No big deal, just changed them around but not a good thing to spill gasoline on the cement below. The two hose connections were next to each other and the same size fittings with no special color coding. When I flipped the heater switch, I ported fuel out the drain line. I remember connecting the fuel line up after checking out a heater for cracks. When I first went on active duty in the Navy I was given a task to fix all the gasoline combustion nose heaters in the S2F airplanes we were using. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking by less able minds-and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. On the next page (x) Michael Crichton makes another observation. Well the stock market has had some fluctuations since, right? Ummm, I think some regulations were done away with also. But there was no way to know in advance whether the rules would increase stability, or make things worse. stock market dropped 22 percent in one day in October 1987, new rules were implemented to prevent such precipitate declines. This uncertainty is characteristic of all complex systems, including man-made systems. In the introduction, Michael Crichton makes the comment, "The total system we call the biosphere is so complicated that we cannot know in advance the consequences of anything we do." He has footnote 1' to that statement that starts out -ฤก.
I picked it up today and started reading about the nanotechnology that goes bad. The book "Prey" by Michael Crichton was mentioned and I have had it on a book shelf for some time but had not read. Heinlein is rising with more coming in the mail, but there are others that are of interest as well. Some of you have made suggestions about what might be of interest The stack of books by Robert A. I have been reading a number of books recently, some factual about the Moon, some fiction. I wonder if we take into account just how hard it is to make something mechanical work as designed, 100% of the time? Sometimes we complain about the cost of human rating a rocket. Although, in this case, emphasis is put on the possible bad occurrences. (non-zero probability) will almost surely take place. It is used as either a purely sarcastic musing that things always go wrong, or, less frequently, a reflection of the mathematical idea that, given a sufficiently long time, an event which is possible "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong". Murphy's law is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as:
Did you hook up the fuel line to the in-port or the drain-port?