Mars_Climate_Orbiter_Mishap

Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Summary of Case Mars Climate Orbiter successfully blasted off a Kennedy Space Center launch pad for a 9-month journey to the Red Planet on Friday, December 11, 1998. The spacecraft was scheduled to arrive in Martian orbit on September 1999, where it was to serve as a weather satellite for two full Earth years. However, on September 23, 1999 the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost, never to be seen or heard from again. After a string of investigations by the Mars Climate Orbiter investigators it was found that the root cause of the accident was a small error, i.e., the English measurement was used by the Lockheed Martin engineers instead of the metric measurement which is required by NASA. The defect was straightforward, well-understood, easy to prevent in design, and easy to catch in testing. However, the sensitivity of the system to this error was very high; a loss of $125 million spacecraft that would have helped us understand the climate of Mars. The problems experienced with the Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) software during the early stages of the flight did not seem to raise any red flags. During the first four months of the MCO mission, the ground software Angular mars, orbiter, software, problems, climate, mission, team, operations, management, been, able, spacecraft, responsible, problem, navigation, mco, information, engineering, data, communication, without, understand, tasks, same, process, organization, nasa, managers, however, group, first, error, both, ways, teams, sides