When saying "we", do you mean you write code for the space missions?
Writing only happy path code as a standard practice in the space sector seems quite absurd. You won't ever achieve absolute precision and errors do happen, yet it seems like systems recover most of the time.
Recently, the antenna of Voyager 2 got misaligned, but it is expected to recover from that. That was only the last problem it encountered over its very long mission - and it managed to recover from all of those so far!
Voyager 2 is already recovered, they waited until it was at the best possible (but still wrong orientation) and just yelled at it so that it heard, even with it being misaligned.
Voyager's programming just brings joy to me to think about.. I mean it's the system as a whole (of course) .. but the fact that they've been capable of flying through the environments they have been, using points of light to align themselves, among other things.. for decades .. and recover from incidents.. is just something I marvel at.
Wow I can't believe I didn't hear about this. It was all over the news when they broke it, so I figured it would be just as widely reported when they fixed it. It's been almost 3 weeks.
There was a NASA project to start developing flight software that's smarter in this kind of way, the Remote Agent. It got an award after flying, but if they continued that line of research I haven't heard about it. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20000116204/downloads/20...
Trying to hand roll a super robust AI software usually backfires. Emergency mode triggers right in the middle of the happy path and ruins your uh, a day if you're lucky. They know that, even I kinda know that.
Writing only happy path code as a standard practice in the space sector seems quite absurd. You won't ever achieve absolute precision and errors do happen, yet it seems like systems recover most of the time.
Recently, the antenna of Voyager 2 got misaligned, but it is expected to recover from that. That was only the last problem it encountered over its very long mission - and it managed to recover from all of those so far!