Perhaps the 84 second burn overflowed the integer (2^6) and was caught by a 2^7s check (127s)
The tweet you link didn’t indicate that. It said that an engine failure likely caused the overrun, running for 127 seconds instead of the planned 84. Why would something have a 2^7 int size check?
Edit: Quoted
The head of Roscosmos Yuri Borisov said that the main cause of the #Luna25 crash was an engine failure. Instead of the planned 84 seconds, he worked 127 seconds.
Am I missing something?
Ah I think it’s Twitter’s new thing where you can’t see replies of your not logged in.
Nitter link. This shows replies.
Mistakes happen. For example, may I introduce you to NASA’s 125 million dollar Mars Climate Orbiter, which spent most of a year traveling to the Red Planet before ignominiously burning up because a Lockheed Martin programmer decided to write the thruster-firing calculations in Imperial units (feet and pounds) instead of following the specifications to use metric units (meters and kilograms).
Why in God’s name would you use a 6-bit signed integer for anything on a spacecraft? I know space-certified chips are pretty barebones, but surely not that bare bones…
This is Roscosmos we’re talking about here. First lunar mission in 25 years??
