Requiem to Phobos-Grunt

Yesterday, after about two months of orbiting the Earth on an intermediary, low-altitude elliptic orbit, Russian interplanetary station had finally fallen back to Earth, luckily into Pacific Ocean, not on some populated area.

Its short flight raised many questions to Roscosmos and even state's officials. Combined with several other satellite launch failures during last year, these questions are especially vital today. Maybe something in the area of top management of Roskosmos is really going wrong, maybe someone still think that world-class high-tech unique things can be developed for amount of money much less than world market suggests. Maybe something is broken at the bottom end of a technological chain, say poor quality control of production.

But here I want to point to only one side of the problem: nowadays, we have many strong rigorous math instruments that can be used to assess reliability and probability of failure for virtually any piece of hardware and software. Researches in the area of development of error-tolerant and reliable hardware and software systems allow one to employ many scientifically proved methods of designing and testing. This is XXI century, at last.

If scarce funding had really taken place, why main engineers and their bosses who were responsible for device subsystems could not just say: "Hey, guys, this is not enough to achieve the project's goals. You either will give us enough resources (time, money, people, equipment, etc.), or we will not sign for the work.". It seems that something is broken in the whole chain of decision making in Roskosmos. Sadly, but such conclusion came to mind after reading news.

Digital Photo Frame Texet TF-618

Last week, I had have to choose digital photo frame as a New Year gift to my mother. I stopped at Texet TF-618 due to its placement of control buttons at the front panel instead of at the backside. All other devices that I saw, have built-in control buttons made as usual mini-knobs, at the back side of them. TF-618 have just opposite design solution: a series of sensor LED-highlighted buttons at the front, just below its screen. This, I suspect, does not significantly raise its cost, but make usability and feel of control much better. I do know that there is small remote infrared control unit supplied with almost each digital photo frame device, including TF-618, but I prefer to have ability to deal with device without it in case it will be lost or accidentally hidden somewhere.