The Untold Truth Of NASA

Publish date: 2024-05-04

We understand people messing up on complex differential equations, but NASA scientists should at least know basic mathematics like how to convert units. Right?

In 1999, NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter. This was a groundbreaking mission. The Mars Climate Orbiter was designed study the planet's weather conditions, atmospheric composition, and do a ton of other experiments. Getting a satellite to perfectly orbit the Earth is a hard enough problem mathematically. Imagine shooting a satellite from Earth and perfectly putting it into orbit around another planet. That's insanely complex. If the satellite got too low in the Martian atmosphere, the friction would burn it up, and the multi-million-dollar satellite would be lost forever.

NASA had to get everything perfect. But when the orbiter got to Mars and fired its thrusters to enter the Martian orbit, the craft started going way too fast and plowed into the surface of the planet. NASA freaked out.

After tons of reviewing the mission, they realized what the mistake was. Somebody programmed the computer flight control software to calculate the thrust in the English unit of pounds, instead of the Metric unit of Newtons. With that little mistake, all the other flight control calculations were off, and the orbiter crashed. Since then, the fiasco has turned into a cautionary tale for physics students worldwide about checking units. How embarrassing.

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