NASA DART autonomous rendezvous spacecraft collision
NASA's $110 million DART spacecraft, designed to demonstrate autonomous satellite rendezvous, collided with its target satellite (which survived) and prematurely ended its own mission after burning through its fuel supply.
The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.
NASA's $110 million DART spacecraft, designed to demonstrate autonomous satellite rendezvous, collided with its target satellite (which survived) and prematurely ended its own mission after burning through its fuel supply.
What the software actually got wrong
A glitch in the spacecraft's onboard navigation software caused it to miscalculate its own position and velocity relative to the target, and it repeatedly fired its thrusters to correct for this phantom error, burning propellant far faster than planned until it ran out of fuel and drifted into a collision its collision-avoidance system could not prevent in time.
A glitch in the spacecraft's onboard navigation software caused...
A glitch in the spacecraft's onboard navigation software caused it to miscalculate its own position and velocity relative to the target
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.
It repeatedly fired its thrusters to correct for this...
it repeatedly fired its thrusters to correct for this phantom error, burning propellant far faster than planned until it ran out of fuel and drifted into a collision its collision-avoidance system could not prevent in time
Requs AI Software FMEA traces this failure mode back to the system-level hazard it feeds, tagging it against the Common Defect Enumeration so it surfaces in review instead of in the field.
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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