Alenia Spazio’s insistence on confidentiality may have played a role in this oversight. NASA reviewers were never given the specs of the receiver. As JPL’s Mitchell explained to Spectrum, “Alenia Spazio considered JPL to be a competitor and treated the radio design as proprietary data.”
I am surprised that NASA would allow a piece of hardware on a spaceship that they do not have the specs for. Unless NASA/ESA do very extensive testing, this seems like a terrible practice.