SPOKANE, Wash. – David Atkinson spent 18 years designing an experiment for the unmanned space mission to Saturn. Now some pieces of it are lost in space. Someone forgot to turn on the instrument Atkinson needed to measure the winds on Saturn’s largest moon.
“The story is actually fairly gruesome,” the University of Idaho scientist said in an e-mail from Germany, the headquarters of the European Space Agency. “It was human error — the command to turn the instrument on was forgotten.”
That is horrible. After 18 years of planning and waiting. I understand however they may be able to interpolate a lot of wind speed data so that he still has some information to work with. We should be thankful, however that the probe was nevertheless successful.
Aaron Fulkerson 