The contractor, by agreement, is supposed to convert its measurements to metrics. The JPL navigation team, on the other hand, uses metric measurements in the complex business of figuring out a spacecraft's position relative to moving planets and keeping it on course. launch industry, traditionally uses English measurements. The initial error was made by contractor Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Colorado, which, like the rest of the U.S. "Our inability to recognize and correct this simple error has had major implications," said JPL director Edward Stone. And yet the problem was never caught and corrected by the system of checks and balances at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, which manages this and numerous other interplanetary missions for NASA.Īs a result, flight controllers believe the spacecraft plowed into the Martian atmosphere, where the stresses crippled it, aborted its insertion into Martian orbit and most likely left it hurtling on through space in an orbit around the sun.īaffled NASA officials said they were struggling to figure out how this happened, and bracing themselves for an onslaught of derision. It now appears the error had affected the orbiter mission from its launching almost 10 months and 416 million miles before its Sept. 3, and the Stardust craft bound for a comet. Officials are scrambling to determine whether a similar error is buried in the computer files of two other spacecraft currently cruising through space: the Mars Polar Lander, scheduled to hit the Martian surface on Dec. NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter was lost in space last week because engineers failed to make a simple conversion from English units to metric, an embarrassing lapse that sent the $125 million craft fatally close to the Martian surface, investigators said yesterday. Scientists do not yet know what caused the Mars Orbiter to crash.
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