Computer data no help
By DAVID SANGER of the New York Times News Service
Washington
Computer experts were baffled today by why none of the five 1.8. M. computers on the Challenger that have aborted so many space launchings, detected anything wrong with the operation until the instant the craft exploded.
On first glance, there was nothing wrong, said Mr Steven Eames, a spokesman for the International Business Machines Corporation team at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston that monitors the flow of data from the space shuttle’s processors. “Nothing was unusual, and then the screen just went blank.”
Until pieces of the wreckage can be examined, however, a stretch of magnetised computer tape, packed with thousands of instrument readings sent from the shuttle until the explosion, may prove to be the best evidence available for investigators. The absence of warning from the shuttle’s processors and the complex network of sensors connected to them could be a tremendous setback for the
United States computer and avionics industries. The combination of computer equipment and programs aboard the shuttle has long be€n hailed as a great achievement. It has been frequently cited as evidence that enormously complex programming, like the kind that would be needed to control the Reagan Administration’s proposed high-technology anti-missile shield, is well within the industry’s reach.
But space officials say they have little choice but to depend on the processors, because human pilots could never keep track of the thousands of bits of information that stream from the shuttle’s sensors.
As a result, the computers have almost complete control of the flight, which is why they will be a centrepiece of the investigation. Most confusing to experts is that the disaster appeared to defy every computer simulation ever written for the shuttle.
“It’s very, very strange,” said Dr L. John Lawrence, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration spokesman at ithe Houston space centre:
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Press, 30 January 1986, Page 4
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315Computer data no help Press, 30 January 1986, Page 4
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