You are about to start the trip of your dreams. You have the tickets, the bags packed, the hotel reserved… and when you land, you realize it is not your destination. That you ended up on another continent. Something like the series Manifest but in another spot on the map. Well, something like that but way more expensive happened to NASA in 1999 with the Mars Climate Orbiter, a space probe that cost about 330 million euros and that, literally, went to the wrong destination because of a calculation error and… ended up disappearing.
Everything was going well… until it wasn’t
The idea seemed simple, they were going to launch a spacecraft to orbit around Mars, and from there begin to study the climate changes of the planet. It was an ambitious project, yes, but it was the best option to study the climate there. And the goal was the same as always: to understand Mars to prepare future missions.
It was launched on December 11, 1998 from Cape Canaveral. It weighed 338 kilos, and was perfectly designed for its mission: measuring temperatures, winds, dust storms… everything necessary to imagine one day human beings walking on Mars.
And while everyone on Earth followed the trajectory, with no alarms or surprises, a subtle failure was sneaking into the calculations. They mixed inches with centimeters… NASA!!
What exactly happened?
Lockheed Martin, one of the contracted companies, was sending data in the imperial system (inches, pounds, feet…), while NASA engineers were working with the metric system (meters, kilos, newtons…). This, in theory, is detected in technical reviews, but for some reason no one saw it. And so, for months, the navigation calculations of the spacecraft kept incorporating that error as if everything was fine because it seemed fine.
When the probe arrived at Mars, it did so on the wrong path. Instead of placing itself in a stable orbit, about 140–150 km from the surface, it passed at only 57 km. And that was its sentence. It is believed that it disintegrated or bounced back into space, but the truth is that nothing was ever heard from it again…
A multimillion-dollar slip
Officially, NASA estimated that the loss of the spacecraft cost 125 million dollars at the time. If we adjust with inflation and other expenses, we are talking about about 330 million dollars today, wow… But money was not the only thing lost, years of work also vanished, the credibility of the program and, above all, the opportunity to obtain very valuable data about the red planet!
And it was such a silly communication error that it seems unbelievable that it happened to NASA, a beginner’s mistake that is not common at all in the organization. How did no one notice they were giving data in different units?
And what did NASA learn?
From that point on, the agency reinforced all its protocols. It became essential to make sure that all units of measurement are correctly converted before getting into any critical calculation or any project, and there was much more insistence on internal audits, cross reviews and never taking for granted that “everything is fine.”
Latent Errors
It was months they carried these errors, and it came to light right when nothing could be done for the probe anymore… Now, the Mars Climate Orbiter remains in memory as one of the biggest slip-ups ever by the Agency, so people can’t say later that communication and a simple calculation are not important!