The Evening Star
by Henry S. F. Cooper · first published 1993
9mentions
3recommended by
3HN commenters
2013–2025first – last mentioned
100% recommend
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
I recommend reading Henry S. F. Cooper's _The Evening Star_, about the Magellan probe used to RADAR map Venus. They diagnosed bad RAM and a race condition in the OS that was causing it "safe" the orbiter. It's a good narrative.
on “Mars Rover Curiosity Has First Big Malfunction” ↗Henry S F Cooper's book _The Evening Star_ describes similar solar-system-scale distance debugging of a race condition on the Magellan Venus orbiter. Pretty tense stuff; the stakes are high, the tools and insight to the actual problems are poor,…
on “Hubble is back” ↗Henry S F Cooper Jr.'s book The Evening Star: Venus Observed describes a similar problem, remote debugging of a race condition (and some other things) of a spacecraft orbiting Venus. Recommended reading for both space and computer geeks (well,…
on “Pathfinder's priority inversion problem, discovered and fixed on Mars (1998)” ↗…Bloom 99. The Great Bridge by David McCullough 100. Loonshots by Safi Bahcall 101. The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming 102. Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner 103. The Evening Star by Henry S. F. Cooper
on “Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things” ↗henry s f cooper's book _the evening star_ is a great description of the Magellan probe (the venus orbiter), and how they were debugging what turned out to be OS race conditions on a spacecraft millions of miles away
on “We Diagnosed and Fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 Anomaly from 15B Miles Away [video]” ↗Henry S F Cooper wrote a wonderful account of debugging OS race condition on the Magellan (Venus) orbiter in The Evening Star
on “The first interstellar software update: The hack that saved Voyager 1 [video]” ↗For those interested in a deep technical book on a previous mission (Magellan) to Venus, I would strongly recommend "The Evening Star: Venus Observed", it's wonderful: http://amzn.to/2BgRXGW
on “Armed with tough computer chips, scientists are ready to return to Venus” ↗I think you mean The Evening Star, marvelous book: http://amzn.to/1Hq8TcX
on “CRS-7 Launch Update” ↗Henry S F Cooper Jr.'s book The Evening Star describes some of the remote debugging and other problem solving that was necessary when the Magellan probe experienced computer problems while orbiting Venus. It's been a few decades since I read it,…
on “NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope” ↗