The main lesson i learnt in this semester is the seriousness of the course I'm taking. Being an Engineer is a very tough cause. I realized it after some long chats i had with a friend of mine. University is merely the taste of what I will be doing in the future. We study many subjects but what i realized was all knowledge cannot be attained by just listening to lecturers.. Every tiny detail should be thoroughly examined and read.. Because in future when I might receive a certain problem it would be a global problem. Some students sadly think that knowing “How to do a SUM” is the most critical part. If that’s the issue they are so mistaken. We all should know what is the point of doing each and every sum.. What happens from the sum? Those are the problems we should figure out.. Lets take Fourier series … We did so many sums on it.. But if I ask Very less amount of people know to answer “Why do we use Fourier Transforms?” .. That’s the most critical question that someone should ask himself/herself. Short answer is ‘converting a time domain function to a frequency domain function’. These are the problems every Engineering student should discuss since when we Engineers receive a global problem in future we should use many theories and sums collectively and solve the issue. If we don’t know what a sum does how could we try resolve any problem through calculation.
We should be able to look at the past and see the disasters which occurred due to tiny mistakes which were done causing massive losses.
One of my favorite examples is the Ariane 5 rocket which faced major disaster due to a tiny software error. Long story short, Ariane 5 rocket was carrying scientific satellites designed to establish precisely how the earth’s magnetic field interacts with solar winds. This Rocket was built for the European Space agency. And after 37seconds into the flight they realized something was going wrong because the nozzles were swiveling in a way that it shouldn’t. After 40 seconds they realized something was seriously wrong so they took all their guts and pressed the self-destruct button of the rocket and exploded it causing a loss of US$370 million… Why did this happen. In normal terms the Software used for the Ariane 5 was from their previous successful rocket the Ariane 4. In a certain calculations they used only 32bit number conversion system since the programmers predicted that most of the bits would be zeroes in the 32Bit system. This was a great software for Ariane 4 but what they didn’t realize is that Ariane 5 is more fast and has a greater acceleration which caused an overflow in the 32bit conversions and it lead to such a big disaster. All because of a tiny mistake which was overlooked by the team. If you want a detail and far more technical description of the Ariane 5 disaster please do refer to the following link :- [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5_Flight_501 ]
Some Images of the Ariane 5…
The Ariane 5 Standing tall...
The Glorious Launch...
End of its course merely 40seconds after lift off.
