It is important to know that throughout history there have been many failures in computer science and engineering due to translation errors. Most of these failures are usually due to incorrect conversions of units of measurement. Something similar happened on June 4, 1996, when the Ariane 5 rocket intended to deploy satellites, has suffered a Catastrophic failure shortly after takeoff.
Software errors are quite common and we constantly face them. A common error in a program can force us to close it or cause blue screens. Of course, this is at the user level.
It was a software error that ended up causing the Ariane 5 rocket to explode. The problem was pretty stupid, but it ended up costing tens of millions of dollars. We’re going to tell you this curious story.
A unit conversion ended in disaster
If we talk about space missions, the first agency that comes to mind is surely NASA. The American space agency is the best known in the world, but there are many others. Then we have the ESA (European Space Agency), or European Space Agency, which develops a large number of projects.
We have to go back to June 4, 1996, when ESA was planning to launch the first version of Ariane 5. This mission was intended to deploy a set of heavy satellites into Earth orbit. Just 39 seconds after takeoff, the ship suffered a catastrophic failure and exploded.
The reason the ship ended up being destroyed was due to a simple software error. No, no blue screen or anything like that was generated, it was a translation error. More specifically, the problem stemmed from an error converting a floating point number to an integer in the navigation system.
For the Ariane 5 guidance system, parts of the Ariane 4 system, a smaller version of the rocket, were “recycled”. Because the software was reused, a critical error that was not present in the previous rocket was not detected. The problem was that the Ariane 4 was “slower”, it did not need as much speed.
Basically, the software was trying to convert a decimal (floating point) number to an integer (without decimal places). During the conversion process, crucial information about the rocket’s trajectory was lost. This failure caused the navigation system to provide erroneous data about the aircraft’s position and speed.
Logically, given these position and speed errors, the rocket’s trajectory quickly deviated from the planned one. Note that the safety systems detected the failure, but correcting the course was no longer possible.
Due to a bad trajectory of Ariane 5, the rocket disintegrated in the atmosphere at an altitude of about 4 kilometers. The cargo was also destroyed in the accident, it was an Indonesian communications satellite worth 500 million dollars.
Of course, a thorough investigation was conducted to find the error that led to the destruction of Ariane 5. The error in the software and the failures in the various safety procedures were detected. For the following Ariane 5 rockets, major changes were made to the manufacturing of the ships so that this would not happen again.
