In October 2022, NASA claimed its Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) spacecraft running across the Universe on an alien-world hunting spree entered the ‘Safe Mode’ only to come back alive.
This happened because of a technical glitch, a sudden unexpected malfunction that we take as a normal software programming fault.
It is however interesting to note that TESS that has discovered and recorded more than 250 exoplanets and plays a crucial role in understanding the Cosmos, remains susceptible to malfunction making the space agencies no stranger to spacecraft hitches.
In a similar instance, ISRO’s maiden Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) underwent a technical glitch and started placing satellites in the wrong orbit, consequently making them no longer usable.
Hubble, too survived the blow.
Do these glitches only affect Space?
Every man-made machine can witness a glitch and scientists realized in the 1970s itself how the incoming radiation can cause computers to display functionality that is so not expected of them.
While it is easier to detect these self-absorbing fault lines in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, it remains eerily difficult to isolate them while they happen on Earth.
Around 2008, a flight suddenly just dropped 200 meters within a span of 20 seconds followed by another drop of 120 meters, leaving nearly 119 people on the plane injured, reason unknown!
However, the report stated: “There was insufficient evidence available to determine whether [an ionizing particle altering computer data] could have triggered the failure mode”.
In a constituency voting in Belgium, a discrete, little-known independent candidate won the elections by a sweeping majority that could never had been possible with even the numbers of voters exercising elections there.
What could be the possible cause of these software glitches?
With more reports and nothing rational in sight, the scientific community has agreed to become increasingly aware of an unseen notoriety i.e., cosmic rays.
Cosmic rays can be emitted from any entity anywhere in the universe be it the Sun, nebulae, dying stars, blackholes etc., but once they enter the Earth’s atmosphere, they break and behave like subatomic particles while they hit and spread out.
Usually, these particles do not affect our day-to-day lives but we are quite past ‘the usuals’ and we see these rays twitching our systems in most unconventional and innovative ways.
With the communication technology getting better and better each day, the microprocessors are getting even more compact and smaller likely to be only interfered by cosmic rays i.e., a little charge and the chip can go crazy.
“The charge needed to reverse a state is smaller. If only a very tiny charge is required, the chances of a subatomic particle inducing such a charge go up, in principle. Plus, there are growing numbers of computer chips out there, in devices from phones to washing machines. The overall area that can be corrupted is actually significantly increasing”, explains a Researcher.
More frequent solar flares and storms causing damages to the electrical wires and disrupting communication seems like a fair possibility in futuristic planet Earth, be it a plane, satellite, computer or even a pacemaker (a small medical device that uses electrical impulses to fix heartbeat) fixed in one’s heart.
Data gets stored in the form of bits inside computer memory as a pair of “ones and zeroes”. In case of a pacemaker functioning fault reported once, a final analysis indicated some of these bits to have reversed, completely changing the data output and causing a software error.
A well-raised question that comes here is how can one fixate the errors happening around, especially in a world of fully autonomous vehicles.
A ‘software glitch’, as per the Russian officials, already could throw the International Space Station out of its wits and a rotational movement in 2021 after the Russian cosmonauts gave a video tour.
In compounding instances, NASA astronauts travelling on the space shuttle noticed that their laptops crashed ‘unusually’ at most times they passed through the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA).
The researchers could plot exactly where and when the errors occurred in their orbit, only to find out plenty of these clustered in an area termed SAA, of course, with the heightened cosmic radiation above surface of planet Earth.
How does this happen?
A software researcher explains: “I started to really wonder if we could possibly have detected a cosmic event through these single-event upsets in our telemetry data.”
“In a lot of the world’s computers, there are single bit errors, or sometimes multiple bit errors that happen, and can affect what domain your software is looking up”.
“To my huge surprise, I started getting things connected. In a lot of the world’s computers, there are single bit errors, or sometimes multiple bit errors that happen, and if they happen at just the right place at just the right time, they can affect what domain your software is looking up.”
For better clarity, the scientific community has already tried to ascertain if this is some anthropogenic cyber security issue, with impossibility lingering around such scenario.
But from natural sources, one possible theory can be that the protons coming in from the Solar system and beyond, towards Earth hit the atoms existing in our atmosphere, causing the nuclei of those atoms to release their neutrons.
These high energy particles (having no charge) smash into other atoms/particles on their way triggering a secondary radiation that can play with tiny electrical charges stored in our machines and flip the bits.
While our atmosphere is adept at protecting us from the majority of these particles, the travelers above get exposed to these, one of the reasons why air crews have restrictions on the time they spend on flying.
Methods have been proposed, nevertheless, to collect such data from millions of users of smartphone cameras or effectively prepare a Neutron monitoring tool that can detect neutrons flying around us or proliferate the use of aeronautic components resistant to the cosmic ray effects.
“There’s less than 50 of these ground-level neutron monitors still operational.”
But the researcher further adds: “There is also this risk of charged particles causing data corruption. Right now, the actual extent of damage, it’s very difficult to predict. It’s impossible to be conclusive. That is the fun part”.