zlacker

Because I pay for NASA and I can ask for NASA to do a post-mortem.

>>guhida+(OP)
I pay for NASA and I don't want them to spend needless resources releasing a public post-mortem. Talk about waste of resources.

>>iLoveO+U
As a spacecraft navigation engineer, I guarantee you said post-mortem is already being written, and is probably going to be posted "publicly" anyway on some deep corner of the NASA website

>>iLoveO+U
This is the right call, let the people of the NASA focus on what is really important, and not waste time on PR.

It's pretty obvious that the people who managed to extend the lifetime of Voyager are very smart, based on all the tricks they had to do.

They are remotely configuring an old-tech device that is billions of kilometers away, with insane lag, and uncertainty that the underlying hardware is even responding properly.

Absolutely anything could have gone wrong at this stage.

They'll anyway investigate internally what happened, in order to hopefully, find a solution.

There is no need to spend resources to make the material public, if the goal is mostly to satisfy curiosity (though it's interesting).

>>iLoveO+U
Asking for a post mortem is not too much to ask. This is the bare minimum for operating serious craft like this.

>>guhida+(OP)
Normally this makes sense, because you're asking why money was wasted. But, in this case if it's permanently bricked you will actually save money, because if Voyager 2 is bricked the team working on it is now redundant. It's not like they had an incentive to be incompetent and waste money - very much the opposite.

>>rvnx+a3
Does this assume the information is made available, but just not as polished as PR?

>>ajb+J6
You calculation only makes sense if you put zero value on operating a probe that far out in the galaxy - in which case you should be asking why there was a team working on it in the first place.

But that value is not zero, and replacing it costs quite a bit - both money and time. Asking how and why this happened is a valid inquiry.

>>iLoveO+U
It definitely got written up internally. Making it public is just a matter of taking that, sticking it into a pdf, and hitting the publish button. A few hours' worth of additional work at most.

>>accoun+Cy
Under the assumption that it is bricked, the value is indeed now zero. I think where we differ is that you are assuming it will be replaced, but I don't think it will be. It's way past its design life so it was going to expire at some point.

For science, I would want to do an enquiry anyway - I'm just commenting on the financial/accountability aspect.

>>birdyr+J5
There's a difference between a post-mortem and a public post-mortem. Nasa is pioneering technology that shouldn't all be public. If you really think the same post-mortem would be published in public and internally, you should not be commenting on HackerNews because it's forbidden below 13 years old.