Mars Climate Orbiter Fails

The Mars surge built on success and assumed more technical success. On Sep­tember 23, the Mars Climate Orbiter was supposed to slip into a proper position to do its work. It did not do so. Instead, it flew off course and either burned up in the Martian atmosphere or missed Mars entirely and wound up circling the Sun in a useless orbit. What went wrong?

NASA convened a board of inquiry under the chairmanship of Arthur Ste­phenson, director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. What the panel found seemed too embarrassing to believe. A young and inexpe­rienced engineer at NASA’s contractor, Lockheed Martin, had failed to convert navigation data from English to metric units. When the data went to JPL, the NASA center assumed that the conversion had taken place. No one checked the facts over the nine-month period during which the $125 million MCO sailed from Earth to Mars. It was an inadvertent mistake with dire consequences. The fact that no one checked the information was viewed by many in NASA as the most serious finding. The Stephenson panel pointed out that inattention, mis – communication, and overconfidence played roles in the mishap.16

What some critics, especially outside NASA, wondered was whether FBC management bore some responsibility. NASA rejected that view. Weiler pointed out that FBC “includes following rules and processes. Those rules and pro­cesses were ignored.”17 Hinners, who once had run space science and was now the responsible senior executive for the robotic probes at Lockheed Martin, thought there was an effect of FBC in this instance. “It’s a matter of sufficient staffing—perhaps 10% or more—to make sure checks and balances work.”18

John Pike, director of space policy for the Federation of American Scientists, put it this way: “They’re basically trying to take 15-gallon trips on io-gallons of gas.” He urged NASA to take a hard look at FBC, a look the Stephenson panel had failed, in his opinion, to take.19

Everyone at NASA who spoke about the incident, especially Ed Stone, di­rector of JPL, said that the mistake would not be repeated. Commenting on the next mission, the Mars Polar Lander, Stone said, “No one wants another mistake to go undetected. We are doubling and redoubling our efforts.”20