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To: John Carragher who wrote (11786)	9/30/1999 5:20:00 PM
From: Rick Slemmer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 62552

From the "How many pounds in a kilometer?" department (or alternately, the "Doesn't take a rocket scientist" department): Metric mixup doomed Mars spacecraft LOS ANGELES (AP) — The $125 million spacecraft that was destroyed on a mission to Mars last week was probably doomed by NASA scientists' embarrassing failure to convert English units of measurement to metric ones, the space agency said Thursday. The Mars Climate Orbiter flew too close to Mars and is believed to have broken apart or burned up in the atmosphere. NASA said the English-vs.-metric mixup apparently caused the navigation error. The mistake was particularly embarrassing because the spacecraft had successfully flown 416 million miles over 9 1/2 months before its disappearance Sept. 23 just as it was about to go into orbit around the Red Planet. Agency officials said the mistake somehow escaped what is supposed to be a rigorous error-checking process. A report is expected in mid-November. "It does not make us feel good that this happened,'' said Tom Gavin of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "This mixup has caused us to look at our entire end-to-end process. We will get to the bottom of this.'' JPL said that its preliminary findings showed that Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Colorado submitted acceleration data in English units of pounds of force instead of the metric unit called newtons. At JPL, the numbers were entered into a computer that assumed metric measurements. "In our previous Mars missions, we have always used metric,'' Gavin said. The numbers were used in figuring the force of thruster firings used by the spacecraft to adjust its position. The bad numbers had been used ever since the spacecraft's launch last December, but the effect was so small that it went unnoticed. The difference added up over the months as the spacecraft journeyed toward Mars. Gavin said he does not expect the error to affect NASA's relationship with Lockheed Martin Astronautics, which has built several probes for the space agency. Lockheed Martin had no immediate comment. The orbiter's sibling spacecraft, Mars Polar Lander, is set to arrive Dec. 3. Gavin said investigators are trying to determine whether NASA made the same mistake with that spacecraft. The Mars Climate Orbiter was on a mission to study the Red Planet's weather and look for signs of water — information key to understanding whether life ever existed or can exist there. It carried cameras along with equipment for measuring temperature, dust, water vapor and clouds. The Mars Polar Lander will study Mars' climate history and weather with the goal of finding what happened to water on the planet. It is equipped with a robotic arm that will collect samples for testing inside the spacecraft.