How Rocket Accident happened due to float data type error in c | Float data type in c

How Rocket Accident happened due to float data type error in c

The Explosion of the Ariane 5

A Floating Point Error That Caused A Damage Worth Half A Billion

On June 4, 1996 an unmanned Ariane 5 rocket launched by the European Space Agency exploded just forty seconds after its lift-off from Kourou, French Guiana. The rocket was on its first voyage, after a decade of development costing $7 billion. The destroyed rocket and its cargo were valued at $500 million. A board of inquiry investigated the causes of the explosion and in two weeks issued a report. It turned out that the cause of the failure was a software error in the inertial reference system. Specifically a 64 bit floating point number relating to the horizontal velocity of the rocket with respect to the platform was converted to a 16 bit signed integer. The number was larger than 32,767, the largest integer storeable in a 16 bit signed integer, and thus the conversion failed.

The software ended up triggering a system diagnostic that dumped its debugging data into an area of memory being used by the programs guiding the rocket’s motors. At the same time, control was switched to a backup computer that unfortunately had the same data.

This was misinterpreted as necessitating strong corrective action and the rocket’s motors swiveled to the limits of their mountings. Disaster ensued.

 The coding was done in Ada. The last line is that caused the tragedy:

L_M_BV_32 := TBD.T_ENTIER_32S ((1.0/C_M_LSB_BV) * G_M_INFO_DERIVE(T_ALG.E_BV));

if L_M_BV_32 > 32767 then
    P_M_DERIVE(T_ALG.E_BV) := 16#7FFF#;
elsif L_M_BV_32 < -32768 then
    P_M_DERIVE(T_ALG.E_BV) := 16#8000#;
else
    P_M_DERIVE(T_ALG.E_BV) := UC_16S_EN_16NS(TDB.T_ENTIER_16S(L_M_BV_32));
end if;

P_M_DERIVE(T_ALG.E_BH) := 
  UC_16S_EN_16NS (TDB.T_ENTIER_16S ((1.0/C_M_LSB_BH) * G_M_INFO_DERIVE(T_ALG.E_BH)));

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