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Thursday marked one year ago today, a NASA probe called Lunar Trailblazer lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its mission was to map the water on the moon, but a day after the launch, mission managers lost contact with the spacecraft. It was never heard from again, unlike B.J. Leiderman, who does our theme music. Now NPR has learned exactly why the $72 million mission failed. Joe Palca has this report.
JOE PALCA, BYLINE: The launch was successful, but the first communication from Lunar Trailblazer showed something was wrong with the power system. A report by a review panel convened by NASA to explore why the mission failed contains the explanation. Software that was supposed to point the spacecraft solar panels toward the sun instead pointed them 180 degrees away from the sun. The panel found other software errors as well. Tim Cook has experience with these kinds of failures.
TIM COOK: When a complicated system fails, it's usually more than one thing that takes it down.
PALCA: Cook was project manager for Terriers, a failed mission to study Earth's ionosphere. It also suffered a pointing problem with its solar panels. Cook says one problem can trigger others.
COOK: You get a cascading series of a couple of different failures that result in, ultimately, the bad outcome that you're investigating to start with.
PALCA: Lockheed Martin built the low-cost Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft. The NASA panel says the company did not properly test the pointing software before launch. Mission managers might have been able to fix that problem, but other software issues made it ultimately impossible.
Neither Lockheed Martin nor NASA would provide a spokesperson for comment. But in a statement, Lockheed said it had learned lessons from Lunar Trailblazer and would make changes going forward. The statement also pointed out that lower-cost missions are inherently riskier. A NASA statement also talked about lessons learned.
Scott Hubbard is a NASA veteran, now at Stanford University. He says, yes, NASA accepts higher risk with lower cost, or so-called class D, missions.
SCOTT HUBBARD: What class D was supposed to mean is that you were taking a big risk of not getting the science that was as high precision as you were planning on. It didn't mean the whole darn thing wouldn't work.
PALCA: Hubbard says you can take risk.
HUBBARD: But take mitigated, understood risk. Don't take foolish risk. And the way I characterize it is, a cheap failure is no good for anybody.
PALCA: Hubbard says the mission loss is particularly hard for scientists who've committed a significant part of their careers to a project, scientists like Robert Lillis. He's at UC Berkeley and principal investigator for another class D mission called Escapade. Escapade is actually a pair of spacecraft headed to Mars to study how the solar wind affects the Martian atmosphere. Lillis says the Lunar Trailblazer experience prompted NASA to give Escapade extra scrutiny before it left Earth last November. Even so, there were nervous moments in the control room after launch.
ROBERT LILLIS: We were supposed to hear from the spacecraft within one hour and possibly as many as three hours.
PALCA: Instead, silence.
LILLIS: My mind immediately went to Trailblazer. And I had this sinking dread in the pit of my stomach.
PALCA: Then mission managers found a small error in the direction ground antennas meant to communicate with the probe were pointing.
LILLIS: Six hours after launch, we looked in the right place - boom. There they were. The relief was like nothing I'd felt in my whole life.
PALCA: The Escapade probes won't reach Mars until September next year, so it'll be a while before he knows whether the lessons of Lunar Trailblazer have truly been learned.
For NPR News, I'm Joe Palca.
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