NASA is preparing for disaster. The space agency is taking a leaf out of the
airline industry’s book and is designing a “black box” flight data recorder for
all its future Mars missions. The hope is that a lot of the guesswork can be
taken out of any inquiry into a future failed mission.
“It’s an idea that been kicked around for a while, but after the loss of Mars
Polar Lander we decided to go ahead and develop a recorder,” says Lynn Lowry,
the project’s leader at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
California.
Lowry’s team is designing the…
