The Missing Units on the Mars Panel
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The Missing Units on the Mars Panel
Leah and Marcus were preparing a new museum panel about the Mars Climate Orbiter. At first glance, their draft looked finished. It had a launch picture, a map of Mars and a short explanation of the mission. Yet one sentence said only that “the spacecraft confused two systems of measurement”.
Leah opened NASA's investigation report. The orbiter had launched on 11 December 1998 to study the climate of Mars and act as a communications relay. Contact ended on 23 September 1999, when the spacecraft reached Mars but failed to enter its planned orbit.
“If we had trusted the old draft, visitors would be reading an oversimplified explanation now,” Leah said. The spacecraft itself had not made a simple choice between two rulers. The investigation located the root cause in a file produced by ground software.
The file
