The Ariane 5 Flight 501
On June 4, 1996, European heavy lift launch vehicle Ariane 5‘s first test flight failed with the rocket self-destructing 37 seconds after launch because of a malfunction in the control software. A data conversion from 64-bit floating point value to 16-bit signed integer value to be stored in a variable representing horizontal bias caused a processor trap (operand error) because the floating point value was too large to be represented by a…
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