Assignment No 1

Name Muqadar Ali

Sap Id 70061566

Class BSSE 7-B

Department CSIT

Teacher Ma’am Mishal Hussain

Subject SVV
Q.1: Make a report on one buggy software incidents.

Report on Ariane 5 space launcher:

On 4 June 1996 the maiden flight of the Ariane 5 launcher ended in a failure. Only about
40 seconds after initiation of the flight sequence, at an altitude of about 3700 m, the
launcher veered off its flight path, broke up and exploded.

The fault was quickly identified as a software bug in the rocket’s Inertial Reference
System. The rocket used this system to determine whether it was pointing up or down,
which is formally known as the horizontal bias, or informally as a BH value. This value
was represented by a 64-bit floating variable, which was perfectly adequate. However,
problems began to occur when the software attempted to stuff this 64-bit variable, which
can represent billions of potential values, into a 16-bit integer, which can only represent
65,535 potential values. For the first few seconds of flight, the rocket’s acceleration was
low, so the conversion between these two values was successful. However, as the
rocket’s velocity increased, the 64-bit variable exceeded 65k, and became too large to fit
in a 16-bit variable. It was at this point that the processor encountered an operand error,
and populated the BH variable with a diagnostic value.
The self-destruction of the launcher occurred near to the launch pad, at an altitude of
approximately 4000 m. Therefore, all the launcher debris fell back onto the ground,
scattered over an area of approximately 12 km2 east of the launch pad. Recovery of
material proved difficult, however, since this area is nearly all mangrove swamp or
savanna.
Nevertheless, it was possible to retrieve from the debris the two Inertial Reference
Systems. Of particular interest was the one which had worked in active mode and stopped
functioning last, and for which, therefore, certain information was not available in the
telemetry data (provision for transmission to ground of this information was confined to
whichever of the two units might fail first). The results of the examination of this unit
were very helpful to the analysis of the failure sequence.
The Inquiry Board makes a number of recommendations with respect to improving the
software process of the European Space Agency. Many are justified, some may be
overkill, some may be very, very expensive to put in place. There is a simpler lesson to
be learned from this unfortunate event, Reuse without a contract is sheer folly. The
Ariane 5 blunder shows clearly that naive hopes are doomed to produce results far
worse than a traditional, reuse less software process. To attempt to reuse software without
Eiffel like assertions is to invite failures of potentially disastrous consequences. The next
time around, will it only be an empty payload, however expensive, or will it be human
lives.