is that this sort of thing happens all the time with spacecraft. Satellites and planetary probes are mostly hand-made assemblies. Things will break. Controllers prove their ability by how well they can handle the inevitable problems that occur on virtually ever mission. It sounds like the good people at Cornell have proven themselves to be, in words from the movie "Apollo 13", "steely eyed missile men." That's a complement.

Back when I was doing satellite operations, glitches were the things that got us excited. Routine operations can get rather dull (with some supports like battery monitoring during a eclipse being absolutely mind numbing). Glitches were an opportunity to be a detective to find the problem and then find a solution if one is possible. Our first rule was "make haste slowly."

I remember one glitch where dozens of telemetry values were not only wrong, they were "impossible." By that, I mean that 8 bit binary values were returning values like -1026. That simply isn't possible in 8 bits. A buddy and I dug out the satellite schematics and diagnosed the problem in just a few minutes. That was fun. On another occassion, I was monitoring a newly launched satellite when I had to go run another satellite support. When I came back, I found that one of the transponders (1 of 10 on the satellite) had died with no warning. With some problems, all you can do is switch to the backup unit and hope it holds.