Mars Climate Orbiter

It's December 1998.

NASA launches the Mars Climate Orbiter, or the MCO.

This is a $125 million satellite, roughly a quarter of a billion dollars in today's money.

A massive investment.

The navigators commanded the MCO to skim the Martian atmosphere at a safe altitude of 226 kilometers based on their flawed trajectory model.

But the physical spacecraft, having been pushed off course by months of mismatched thruster firings, wasn't where the computer thought it was.

Instead of skimming the exosphere at 226 kilometers, the Mars Climate Orbiter slammed into the thickening Martian atmosphere at an altitude of just 57 kilometers, traveling at thousands of miles an hour.

And the aerodynamic friction at that speed and density is just unsurvivable.

Amen.

On the 23rd of September 1999, NASA's engineers watched their sensors, waiting for the Mars Climate Orbiter to touch Mars' atmosphere and slow into orbit.

Instead, the probe vanished, never to be heard from again.

Nine months in flight, $327 million, and the spacecraft just winked out of existence.

[upbeat music]

In December of 1998, NASA launched a spacecraft called the Mars Climate Orbiter.

The mission of this orbiter was to travel hundreds of millions of miles to Mars, and to study the planet's atmosphere, and help scientists to learn more about the climate over there.

So these brilliant engineers spent years, and years, and years designing and building this thing, making all sorts of predictions and calculations to try to get all of these millions of miles away successfully.

So a lot of them went on to actually be part of Mars Global Surveyor, which launched in 1996.

The Mars Climate Orbiter, which launched in 1998. and the 2001 Mars Odyssey, which of course launched in 2001, as well as the much more recent Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter from 2005.

That sounds like a failure, but actually it did lead to the success of several other missions and some pretty good lessons learned, despite the fact that the mission itself didn't succeed.

So a little bit of Mars, a little bit of Mars and a little bit of lucky unluckiness back from 1992.

I believe that there are many, many reasons and instances where that is actually not even something that can be good for you as a technical professional and even for your self, you know, image in terms of vis-a-vis your colleagues.

that is not a good look if you're not able to express yourself technically on a piece of paper so it it is definitely something that we have to watch out for and we're gonna kind of go through an anchor story because i do think this was very very starkly obvious that technical skills technical writing is still a big deal so The year was September 1999, and NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter arrives at Mars after traveling hundreds of millions of kilometers.

Then, all of a sudden, NASA loses signal with the rover, or the orbiter.

And then this, you know, finger-pointing starts, and, you know, what happened shouldn't have happened, and so forth, and...

And this is really goes back to the story.

The NASA lesson learned database contains the following lessons learned related to interface design.

the Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board Phase 1.

The MCO mishap, Mars Climate Orbiter Investigation Board, determined that the root cause for the loss of the MCO spacecraft was a failure to use metric units in the coding of the ground software file.

Got it.

And on this date in 1999, NASA announced the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter.

And it come to find out one engineering team had used Imperial units while another used metric units, turning a measurement mismatch into a very, very expensive lesson about checking the labels.

Ooh.

I looked it up.

It's the, um, the Mars Climate Orbiter, where-

Oh, right.

[laughs]

Now don't worry, it's going to take forever for the Earth to slow down noticeably, and when it does, we'll just keep adding leap seconds to keep things balanced.

But units are extremely important in chemistry and in sciences in general, as we learned when the Mars Climate Orbiter crashed into Mars because instructions were inputted in the wrong units.

Next time you get a B instead of an A because you didn't keep track of your units, just remember, at least you didn't destroy a 300 million dollar mission to Mars.

But what do I mean when I say keep track of your units? Well, I mean watch them.

It is measured in microscopic fractions of a degree over millions of miles.

This brings us to the tragedy of the Mars Climate Orbiter.

I remember reading about this one in the NASA archives, and it hurts my soul every time I think about it.

It was the late 1990s.

The Mars Climate Orbiter was a $328 million mission.

It was a beautiful piece of machinery designed to study the Martian atmosphere, monitor the climate, act as a crucial communications relay for future rovers on the surface.

It was a vital mission.

I mean, did anything structural actually change at NASA after this, or was it just a very expensive slap on the wrist?