Mars Orbiter

Investigation of the Solar System planet is an important part of scientific research. Thus, the calculations and measurements for space missions should very accurate and should not contain any mistake since it would lead to mission failure and the loss of great sums of money spent on the mission. The effect of a single failure on the spacecraft mission is in detail described by Robin Lloyd in the article “Metric mishap caused loss of NASA orbiter.”

In 1999, NASA sent the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft to Mars in order to investigate its climatic conditions and provide the data transfer for further investigation missions. However, the spacecraft was made with English measurement units, despite the fact that NASA uses the metric system from 1990. As a result, due to the end-to-end process failure, i.e. something went wrong with the transitions of English units into metric ones, the mission failed. In addition, NASA lost $125 million and afterward had to adapt the further mission to transfer the data from Mars’ surface without the Orbiter (Lloyd, 1999).

The importance of this event cannot be neglected since such mistakes may lead to more severe results. For example, in human space missions, such a mistake may lead to a lethal outcome for an astronaut. Thus, the conclusion is simple: further techniques requiring the precise calculations should be made in one system – metric one since it is the language of science. In addition, this event made a precedent for transferring the Unites States to the metric system.