Nov 10 1999
From The Space Library
The Mars Climate Orbiter Mission Failure Investigation Board released its first report, identifying eight contributing factors that had led to the 23 September loss of Orbiter as it entered its Martian orbit. Arthur Stephenson, chairperson of the board investigating the failure, agreed with NASA on the causes of the mission's failure. The board reported that "the failed translation of English units into metric units in a segment of ground-based, navigation-related mission software" was the primary cause of the loss, but that other significant factors had set the stage for the mission's failure. Moreover, the team had failed to identify and correct multiple mistakes, leading to "a major error in our understanding of the spacecraft's path as it approached Mars." The failure board faulted the Mars Climate Orbiter team with "inadequate consideration of the entire mission and its postlaunch operation as a total system, inconsistent communications and training within the project, and lack of complete end-to-end verification of navigation software." Although engineers working with Lockheed Martin Astronautics' mission operations team had failed to convert English units into metric for entering data into ground-based navigation software, the investigating board focused most of its attention on the navigation team at NASA's JPL, which had overall management authority for the mission. The board remarked that, because it had navigated interplanetary spacecraft successfully for 30 years, JPL had developed a "widespread perception that `Orbiting Mars is routine'," leading it to pay inadequate attention to the risk of faulty navigation.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
