The Mars Climate Orbiter: A Multimillion Dollar Mistake
The Story Grossman (1999) addresses the incident of NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter in her article named “Metric Math Mistake Muffed Mars Meteorology Mission”. She explains how a simple unit conversion mistake caused the Orbiter to burn up in the Martian atmosphere. The vessel costed NASA a whopping $125 million when it vanished into the Martian atmosphere. The problem, later identified by a NASA review board, owed to a software glitch. The software was used to calculate the thrust in “pounds of force” while the other software took the input in “newtons”. This happened due to the fact that ...
