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Costly NASA Mistake

What mistake caused NASA to lose a $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter?

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In 1999, NASA lost a $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) because NASA mixed up metric and English units when coding the software for the mission. Per NASA's report on the mishap, "the root cause for the loss of the MCO spacecraft was the failure to use metric units in the coding of a ground software file" that was actually "in English units." This demonstrates that massive scholarly organizations can make this kind of simple human error, and virtually anyone can correct it before it causes harm. The lesson from this costly blunder, which has broad applications in many areas of life, is to verify your work and that of others before accepting it as true. A 6-minute video with notes on how to accomplish that is provided at the second link below.




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