ESA Schiaparelli Mars lander crash
The European Space Agency's Schiaparelli lander crashed into the Martian surface at high speed, destroyed on impact.
The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.
The European Space Agency's Schiaparelli lander crashed into the Martian surface at high speed, destroyed on impact.
What the software actually got wrong
A brief saturation of the lander's inertial measurement unit during a rapid rotation was misinterpreted by the landing software as the lander having already touched down, causing it to jettison its parachute and briefly fire its landing thrusters at high altitude before falling to the surface.
A brief saturation of the lander's inertial measurement unit...
A brief saturation of the lander's inertial measurement unit during a rapid rotation was misinterpreted by the landing software as the lander having already touched down, causing it to jettison its parachute and briefly fire its landing thrusters at high altitude before falling to the surface.
Requs AI Edge Case flags this exact pattern at the requirements and architecture stage — before a single line of code implementing it exists — so the assumption behind it gets challenged while it is still cheap to fix.
Beyond code coverage and "shall" testing
Root causes like this one rarely show up in code coverage or requirements-compliance testing, because nobody wrote a requirement anticipating the specific edge case that broke. Requs AI Edge Case and Requs AI Software FMEA are built to surface exactly this class of overlooked failure mode — before the software is written.
Surfaces this before code exists
Identifies edge cases like this one at requirements and architecture time, using the Common Defect Enumeration to catalog failure patterns seen across hundreds of real-world software failures — including this one.
Connects the failure mode to the hazard
Traces this class of root cause directly to the system-level hazard it can produce, so a defect pattern like this one gets flagged during design review instead of after it ships.
Find the overlooked root causes before they ship.
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