https://susam.net/maze/very-remote-debugging.html

Very Remote Lisp Debugging Story

By Susam Pal on 03 Sep 2007

There is a wonderful story about a legendary Lisp debugging story in
the second chapter of the book Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel.
Quoting the story here:

    An even more impressive instance of remote debugging occurred on
    NASA's 1998 Deep Space 1 mission. A half year after the space
    craft launched, a bit of Lisp code was going to control the
    spacecraft for two days while conducting a sequence of
    experiments. Unfortunately, a subtle race condition in the code
    had escaped detection during ground testing and was already in
    space. When the bug manifested in the wild--100 million miles
    away from Earth--the team was able to diagnose and fix the
    running code, allowing the experiments to complete. One of the
    programmers described it as follows:

        Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that
        is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience.
        Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft
        proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem.

The original source of this story is an article called Lisping at JPL
written by Ron Garret in 2002. This story occurs in the section
called 1994-1999 - Remote Agent of the article.

Comments
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Maze Tags Feed Subscribe About Home GitHub Twitter

(c) 2001-2022 Susam Pal