Today I Learned

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TIL that in 1962, NASA's Mariner 1 spacecraft failed to orbit and had to be blown up 5 minutes after liftoff due to a single typo in its programmed guidance equations, causing NASA a setback of $80 mi (www.vice.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One has an overbar, denoting that it is an average. It is possible whatever software you are using to view the post doesn't know how to display the character.

Basically the computer was taking a direct value (noisy) from the sensor and trying to course-correct, rather than correcting based on an average (smoother) signal.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Damn, doing anything based on an absolute value is indeed very different than doing so based on a mean. That's a big mistake