NASA’s Mars Orbiter Crash

In December of 1998, NASA launched a spacecraft to Mars. They were hoping this orbiter would stay in Mars’ orbit and collect weather data for them. It did not.

On September 23^rd of the next year, NASA lost contact with the orbiter. The reason is because NASA engineers and contractors used different units when designing the craft, so it was doomed to fail from the jump. Nobody caught the $125 million mistake until it was off course and 416 million miles away from Earth.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab was working with Lockheed Martin on the orbiter. NASA uses metric units whenever they work, and Lockheed uses standard but had apparently agreed to convert their units when working with NASA. Obviously, they forgot to do that, and basically had NASA spend a hundred million dollars to learn something they already knew: converting units is necessary for correct calculations and space exploration.

I mentioned it in another blog post but making sure that the same units are being used during projects is critical to an engineer’s success. If units are not the same, everyone on the team should be aware of that fact and should be actively converting those units every step of the way to make sure that the project goes on without a hitch.

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Mistakes to Avoid

Works Cited:

Sawyer, Kathy. “Mystery of Orbiter Crash Solved.” The Washington Post, 1 Oct. 1999, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/space/stories/orbiter100199.htm