Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap

5 Pages 1241 Words

Summary of Case
Mars Climate Orbiter successfully blasted off a Kennedy Space Center launch pad for a 9-month journey to the Red Planet on Friday, December 11, 1998. The spacecraft was scheduled to arrive in Martian orbit on September 1999, where it was to serve as a weather satellite for two full Earth years. However, on September 23, 1999 the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost, never to be seen or heard from again. After a string of investigations by the Mars Climate Orbiter investigators it was found that the root cause of the accident was a small error, i.e., the English measurement was used by the Lockheed Martin engineers instead of the metric measurement which is required by NASA. The defect was straightforward, well-understood, easy to prevent in design, and easy to catch in testing. However, the sensitivity of the system to this error was very high; a loss of $125 million spacecraft that would have helped us understand the climate of Mars.
The problems experienced with the Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) software during the early stages of the flight did not seem to raise any red flags. During the first four months of the MCO mission, the ground software Angular Momentum Desaturation (AMD) files were not used in the orbit determination process because of multiple file format errors and incorrect spacecraft attitude data specifications. Despite all these hints that there were serious problems in the software and perhaps the development process, reliance was still placed on the supposedly fixed software without extra manual checks or alternative calculations to check the results.
As a recommendation by the MCO investigators, NASA was asked to implement a “mission success first” axiom instead of the faster, better, cheaper approach. The faster-better-cheaper approach was implemented because there was a need to cut project budget and the reduction of personnel; however the management lost track of other tasks, such as making sure tha...