John Pike, space policy director at the Federation of American Scientists, said that it was embarrassing to lose a spacecraft to such a simple math error. Over the course of the journey, the miscalculations were enough to throw the spacecraft so far off track that it flew too deeply into the Martian atmosphere and was destroyed when it entered its initial orbit around Mars last week. None of JPL’s rigorous quality control procedures caught the error in the nine months it took the spacecraft to make its 461-million-mile flight to Mars. The normal thing is to use metric and to specify that.” “We were transmitting English units and they were expecting metric units. “It was launched that way,” said Noel Hinners, vice president for flight systems at Lockheed Martin’s space systems group. Accident review panels convened by JPL and NASA are still investigating why no one detected the error. Earlier this month, an independent national security review concluded that many of those failures stemmed from an overemphasis on cost cutting, mismanagement, and poor quality control at Lockheed Martin, which manufactured several of the malfunctioning rockets.īut NASA officials and Lockheed executives said it was too soon to apportion blame for the most recent mishap. The loss of the Mars probe was the latest in a series of major spaceflight failures this year that destroyed billions of dollars worth of research, military and communications satellites or left them spinning in useless orbits. “There seems to have emerged over the past couple of years a systematic problem in the space community of insufficient attention to detail.” “That is so dumb,” said John Logsdon, director of George Washington University’s space policy institute. In a sense, the spacecraft was lost in translation.
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