The Unit That Crossed a Boundary: Mars Climate Orbiter, 1999
The Mars Climate Orbiter, launched in December 1998, was lost during its orbit insertion around Mars in September 1999. The failure was attributed to a unit mismatch between the software systems of Lockheed Martin and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This incident highlights the critical importance of ensuring consistent units in engineering and software interfaces.
- ▪The Mars Climate Orbiter was designed to study Mars' atmosphere and serve as a communications relay.
- ▪It was lost due to a software interface error involving a unit mismatch between imperial and metric measurements.
- ▪The spacecraft's trajectory was miscalculated, leading it to enter the Martian atmosphere at an altitude of 57 km instead of the intended 226 km.
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try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3841501) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Vivian Voss Posted on May 20 • Originally published at vivianvoss.net The Unit That Crossed a Boundary: Mars Climate Orbiter, 1999 #postmortem #systemdesign #softwareengineering #freebsd Tales from the Bare Metal (4 Part Series) 1 The Backup That Wasn't 2 The Command That Removed Too Much 3 The Regex That Ran Unbounded 4 The Unit That Crossed a Boundary: Mars Climate Orbiter, 1999 Tales from the Bare Metal — Episode 04 23 September 1999.
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