beres@cadnetix.COM (10/05/88)
While watching the Shuttle land Monday, I heard the above comment.
I was watching on ABC where I couldn't hear much comm traffic, due to
Peter and his guest a**hole chattering away non-stop. But I did hear the
above. So what does this mean:
1. I heard it as, "please allow Discovery to use its Backup Flight
Software, because its main 4 computers don't appear to agree.".
This, of course, caused huge consternation for me.
2. Idle and wrong speculation, fool!
3. Hauck did (now according to NBC) fly Discovery in manually [as
manually as the thing can get, anyway].
4. EE Times, in their Shuttle series, listed a great number of near
catastrophes in the program - most of which I'd never heard
about; if the BFS was "vectored to", and assumption (1) is
true, will NASA come clean?
I gotta believe (2). Either I heard it wrong or it means something else.
If I was right you'd think we'd have heard something by now.
Tim
..words to memorize words hypnotize words make my mouth exercise words all
fail the magic prize... -- VF
Tim Beres Cadnetix, 5775 Flatirons Pkwy, Boulder, CO 80301
beres@cadnetix.com {uunet,boulder,nbires}!cadnetix!beresphil@titan.rice.edu (William LeFebvre) (10/11/88)
In article <4361@cadnetix.COM> beres@cadnetix.COM () writes: >While watching the Shuttle land Monday, I heard the above comment. >I was watching on ABC where I couldn't hear much comm traffic, due to >Peter and his guest a**hole chattering away non-stop. But I did hear the >above. So what does this mean... It's a standard call. They always do it during landing. I think I actually heard the call twice during the descent. I understand that it is updating the backup computer's idea of where the shuttle is so that it agrees with the primary computers. The "vector" describes the current status of the vehicle: position, direction, speed, etc. (I'm not sure what all the vector really describes, but you get the idea). That call just directs the crew to update the BFS computer with the primary computers' vector. So it is taking information *from* the primaries to update the backup. The obvious questions are: why do they need to do that? Can't the backup keep track of where it is on its own? Why would it ever disagree? I don't know the answers, but I'll try to find out. William LeFebvre Department of Computer Science Rice University <phil@Rice.edu>