They were able to recover the failed backup gyroscope by executing a series of attitude maneuvers while switching between operational modes on the gyro.
They literally shook the spacecraft and turned the gyro off-and-on.
Sometimes you gotta bang on something to get it to work!
I would love to buy a beer for the mission operations team member who came up with that idea!
edit: I have to add, i just found out about the extent of the definition.
>make a malfunctioning device or person work.
If you want to know how an unknown system reacts, first thing you do is to hit it hard.
What he meant was that applying the Heaviside function to the inputs of a system to determine the step response [1] is one of the first things we should do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_response
(Actually, our control classes told us to do both to get a basic view of a system.)
setTimeout(function() { ... setTimeout(function() { ... }, Math.random() 1000); }, Math.random() 1000);
// winning!
Or its siblings, including https://github.com/mattdiamond/fuckitjs