More than 10 years ago, Mars Climate Orbiter went missing, just in the final days of its journey towards "the red planet". What for a time was a mistery, rapidly showed as one of the biggest blunders of all time (and a good reason for everyone to adopt a global metric system...).
Mars Climate Orbiter was a probe built on the awake of news that Mars might still contain water... and, maybe, even life. It was a time when NASA built and dispatched to the planet a number of spacecrafts to better understand the "4th rock from the Sun". Still, the 125 Million USD probe disappeared, in the ending days of its 10 months journey to Mars.
The reason for that disaster can easily be mistaken my a joke. "People sometimes make mistakes" admitted a NASA Administrator, commenting on the conclusions of a 1999 review. What happened, according to that review was... that one engineering team working on the spacecraft used imperial units whilst other used metric ones. The failure to correct that mismatched, originated miscommunications between the command center on Earth and the way the probe read and interpreted the information it received.s of all time (and a good reason for everyone to adopt a global metric system...).
And down went a spacecraft crashing into Mars, because it didn't really understand if they were talking with it in kilometers or miles...
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