Java Reference
In-Depth Information
S
ELF
C
HECK
13.
Why doesn't the
DataSetReader.read File
method catch any
exceptions?
14.
Suppose the user specifies a file that exists and is empty. Trace the flow
of execution.
519
520
R
ANDOM
F
ACT
11.1: The Ariane Rocket Incident
The European Space Agency (ESA), Europe's counterpart to NASA, had
developed a rocket model called Ariane that it had successfully used several times
to launch satellites and scientific experiments into space. However, when a new
version, the Ariane 5, was launched on June 4, 1996, from ESA's launch site in
Kourou, French Guiana, the rocket veered off course about 40 seconds after liftoff.
Flying at an angle of more than 20 degrees, rather than straight up, exerted such an
aerodynamic force that the boosters separated, which triggered the automatic
self-destruction mechanism. The rocket blew itself up.
The ultimate cause of this accident was an unhandled exception! The rocket
contained two identical devices (called inertial reference systems) that processed
flight data from measuring devices and turned the data into information about the
rocket position. The onboard computer used the position information for
controlling the boosters. The same inertial reference systems and computer
software had worked fine on the Ariane 4.
However, due to design changes to the rocket, one of the sensors measured a larger
acceleration force than had been encountered in the Ariane 4. That value,
expressed as a floating-point value, was stored in a 16-bit integer (like a
short
variable in Java). Unlike Java, the Ada language, used for the device software,
generates an exception if a floating-point number is too large to be converted to an
integer. Unfortunately, the programmers of the device had decided that this
situation would never happen and didn't provide an exception handler.
When the overflow did happen, the exception was triggered and, because there was
no handler, the device shut itself off. The onboard computer sensed the failure and
switched over to the backup device. However, that device had shut itself off for
