Does anyone know if NASA used a Fortran program to predict the path of the large frig that they hurled into a distant comet. I wonder if they know whether the momentum change from the frig or the loss of mass from the impact was more important, in the long run if this was a Physics 1 exam question, I would guess 2.
I wouldn’t know about that project,
but they used FORTRAN in Artemis 1 project. Unfortunately, after 10 years of development time it failed due to a fuel leak … which turned out to be caused by a memory leak in a FORTRAN77 common block statement written 40 years ago, which in turn was caused by implicit typing and the absence of a the “implicit none” statement.
Some guy from NASA said that fortunately all SpaceX code is written in Julia (E. Musk actually loves Star Trek but hates Dinosaurs) so humanity can keep going to space because of some linguistic advances.
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Almost humourous. LOL
I have seen a film on NASA software control, those people are out of this world good.
I must laugh at the people who use the TRL from Nasa and fail to understand the signficance. A year of running without stopping in the field is a whole year, very very hard to get a computer to run for a whole year with a simple Fortran program and not stop. I have been doing in constantly for the last 7 years. Two main problems, power and Windows updating, it can hang a computer, blasted thing.
There is an excellent article on LINUX and NASA in the latest MAXIMUM PC, it does not mention Fortran, but it is worth the read.
FOR TRL 7 and above, I use a watching program to watch the main program and restart the beast if it fails. The simple watching programs are usually ok. The current thought on the computer is to upload a number to a MySQL database every 8 seconds and watch that with another computer in a remote location, then we can restart the failed computer.
LINUX has some serious design flaws for our work.
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