Question

NASA has sent about a dozen robotic lander and rover missions to Mars, and only seven have succeeded. One of these missions, the Mars Polar Lander, was lost due to a problem with a sensor. A sensor onboard the spacecraft triggered the shutdown of the lander's engines when it thought the craft had landed on the planet, but it had not reached the surface yet; in fact, the craft was 131 feet above the surface when the engines were turned off, and the resulting drop destroyed the vehicle.

For this discussion, identify and discuss at least one other disaster that was caused by an embedded system failure, including problems with either the hardware or software.

Answer 1

Making a small mistakes in embedded system either in hardware or software will result in malfunctioning of devices

One such event is given below,

AT&T - No answer calls

In U.S at 1990 ,75 million phone calls went unanswered across the country ,

This trouble happened due to a single switch out of 114AT&T's has malfunctioned due to a error in a single line of code in switch.This malfunction lead to shutdown of switching centers

Even though they turned on centers it sent messages to other centers,this made the company to Shutdown and reset the whole centers

American Airlines alone estimated this small error cost it 200,000 reservations.

Cause For this Failure:

In Embedded system both hardware and software are integrated withh each other, any changes in software will affect hardware in no time and vice versa

The cause for above mentioned error is Error in a single line code

This Helps us to understand that either there is error in hardware or software of embedded system ,it will surely leads to malfunctioning of device