The Huygens report temporarily lost contact with the Cassini probe, thanks to a 'glitch' in the ESA's programming.
"It was an ESA responsibility," ESA Science Director said at Huygens mission control here. "We should have redundancy at all levels [of the mission], including the ability to send commands."
The communications failure occurred on Cassini, not Huygens, and was caused by an error "as simple as throwing a switch to, 'On.' We did not set the Cassini software to 'On' and it's our fault," said Jacques Louet, head of science projects at ESA. "Space does not forgive stupid mistakes, and we made a stupid mistake. I take full responsibility."
Louet said a Huygens Mission Operations Plan sent by ESA to Cassini managers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory contained improperly written and confusing information. "JPL executed the instructions we gave them," Louet said. "One lesson we hopefully will draw from this is that you need independent reviews of all systems. It's a classic example of the most-simple things escaping review because they are simple."
That must have been embarrassing.
Putting SETI Back On The Adult's Table
Okay, I confess, I snicker at the thought of a career spent trying to listen into aliens exchanging joke emails. But thatis obviously reductio ad absurdum. Here's an article saying that perhaps it's not as dumb as we thought.
"The dismissal has several causes, all reinforcing each other," Haisch responded. "Most of the observations are probably misinterpretations, delusions and hoaxes. I have seen people get confused by Venus or even Sirius when it is flashing colors low in the sky under the right conditions. Having been turned off by this, most scientists never bother to look any further, and so are simply blissfully ignorant that there may be more to it," he said.
Deardorff, the lead author of the JBIS article, points out in a press statement: "It would take some humility for the scientific community to suspend its judgment and take at least some of the high quality reports seriously enough to investigatebut I hope we can bring ourselves to do that."
According to Haisch, there is a motivation not just for scientific tolerance of the UFO issue, but a strong scientific prediction that there ought to be some genuine ET signature in the data. "This potentially changes the relationship of the UFO phenomenon to science in a significant way. It takes away the 'not invented here' prejudice, pointing out that a 'yes' to ET visitation is exactly what side our current physics and astrophysics theories would come down on as the most likely situation," Haisch concluded.
Well, it may be worth re-considering the case for SETI as being the most important project of them all. I for one can see that on the day SETI strikes gold, the dividends would be enormous.
- Art Neuro
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