sEe T ION 2.

2 • An Error of Units on the Way to Mars 33

spacecraft weighed some 1387 pounds and was part of a 125 million-dollar planetary
exploration program. The spacecraft was designed to be the first orbiting weather
satellite for the planet Mars. Remote exploration of Mars is an important scientific
endeavor. Besides the Earth, Mars is the planet in our solar system that has the
most hospitable climate, including a landscape that has been shaped by landslides,
wind, volcanism, and water. In addition to gathering information about Martian
weather, data from the spacecraft would have been u eful to help scientists answer
such profound questions as, What caused drastic change in the climate of Mars and
Were the conditions necessary for primitive life ever present?
The Mars Climate Orbiter (MCa) was launched aboard a Delta II rocket from
Cape Canaveral, Florida. The spacecraft was to arrive at Mars on September23, 1999,
and it was scheduled to complete its primary science mission about five years later.
As the MCa approached the northern hemisphere of Mars, the spacecraft was to fire
its main engine for 16 minutes and 23 seconds at a thrust level of 640 N. The engine
burn would slow down the spacecraft and place it into an elliptical orbit. During
subsequent passes around the planet, thrusters on the MCa would further lower the
spacecraft into the more circular orbit that was needed for its science mission.
However, following the first main engine burn, the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration ( AS A) uddenly i sued the following statement:
Mars Climate Orbiter is believed to be lost due to a suspected navigation
error. Early this morning at about 2 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time the orbiter
fired its main engine to go into orbit around the planet. All the information
coming from the spacecraft leading up to that point looked normal. The
engine burn began as planned five minutes before the spacecraft passed
behind the planet as seen from Earth. Flight controllers did not detect a
signal when the spacecraft was expected to come out from behind the planet.

The following day, it was announced that

Flight controllers for NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter are planning to abandon
the search for the spacecraft at 3 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time today. The team
has been using the 70-meter-diameter (230-foot) antennas of the Deep Space
Network in an attempt to regain contact with the spacecraft.

What went wrong? A close look at the spacecraft's flight trajectory revealed that
during its final approach to the planet, the Mars Climate Orbiter apparently passed
only 60 km above the Martian surface, rather than the planned closest approach of
between 140 km and 150 km. Flight engineers had considered 85 km as the minimum
safe altitude for the spacecraft's flyby. The implication of the unexpectedly low
altitude as the spacecraft approached Mars was that either the spacecraft burned up
and crashed, or it skipped off the thin Martian atmosphere like a stone on the surface
of a lake and began to orbit the sun. Either way, the spacecraft was lost.
ASA thoroughly investigated the cause behind the spacecraft's loss. The Mars
Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board found that the primary problem was
an error that occurred when information was transferred between two teams that
were collaborating on the spacecraft's operation and navigation. As it turns out, in a
segment of the ground-based computer software for navigating the spacecraft, those
PT ER 2 • Problem-Solving and Communication Skills

teams failed to convert a quantity properly between the United States Customary
System and the International System of Units.
The engineering quantity in question is called the engine's impulse, and it rep-
resents the net effect of the rocket engine's thrust over the time that the engine
bums. In order to steer the spacecraft and make changes to its velocity, NASA's sci-
entists and engineers needed to know the engine's impulse accurately. Impulse has
the dimensions of (force) x (time), and mission specifications called for it to have
been given in the units of newton-seconds. Numerical values for the impulse were
reported by one team without indicating the dimensions, and the data were mistak-
enly interpreted by a second team as being given in the units of pound-seconds. One
group of scientists and engineers working on the spacecraft's navigation thought that
the impulse was specified in the International System of Units, and the other group
understood the numerical values to be given in the United States Customary System.
This error resulted in the main engine's effect on the spacecraft's trajectory being
underestimated by a factor of 4.45, which is precisely the conversion factor between
newtons and pounds.
The proper accounting of units is not necessarily "rocket science," but it is im-
portant. In the following sections, we begin developing good practices for keeping
track of units in your calculations and for reporting them with your numerical an-
swers. Those are important skills for solving engineering problems and for making
sure that others have confidence in your work and can clearly understand it.