⚙️ Techpublished 2w ago
A missing unit conversion doomed a $125 million spacecraft
In September 1999, NASA lost the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter as it entered the Martian atmosphere. The spacecraft dipped far too close—just 57 kilometers above the surface instead of the planned 150—and disintegrated. An investigation uncovered a simple software blunder: Lockheed Martin's ground software calculated thruster impulse in imperial pound-seconds, while NASA's navigation team expected metric Newton-seconds. The mismatched data steered the robotic explorer fatally off course.
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