MARS CLIMATE ORBITER
Once again NASA has "lost" another Mars probe. This time it was the Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) valued at $125 million. On September 23rd 1999 at 9:06 AM UTC, JPL lost contact with the MCO on it's final orbital insertion burn manoeuvre and failed to re-establish contact.
NASA's excuse for the multi-million dollar failure is a navigation error resulting from a mix-up between the use of Imperial and Metric systems. The MCO spacecraft team in Colorado and the mission navigation team in California had apparently been using different units to calculate their data. As ABC News reported,
"The bad numbers had been used ever since the spacecraft's launch last December, but the effect was so small that it went unnoticed. The difference added up over the months as the spacecraft journeyed towards Mars."
This excuse is just plain ridiculous!!!
The conversion factor from pounds of thrust (Imperial) to Newton's (Metric) is 4.44 Newton's to the pound. Since December 11 1998, the velocity calculations would have been in error by approximately 75%. However the MCO had successfully flown 416 million miles over 9.5 months and was on target. The planned altitude before the fatal orbital insertion burn was to be 93 miles. However upon review of the last 6-8 hours of data, NASA apparently found indications that the real altitude was approximately 37 miles and that this was somehow overlooked. Either the worlds best scientists and organisations are incompetent hopeless idiots or this is another one of NASA's cover stories.
The important camera on board the MCO is called the Mars Color Imager (MARCI). MARCI is designed to observe atmospheric processes on a global scale and study the interaction between the atmosphere and the surface of Mars. Wide-angle and Medium coverage some 20% better than Viking were also to be provided in ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared wavelengths. MARCI is under the control of Michael C. Malin, President of Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS). Michael Malin remains the only person NASA trusts when it comes to imaging Mars. In the previous Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) mission, the military team responsible for the Clementine mission to map our Moon put in bids for the camera, offering superior technology than MSSS, but were rejected. MSSS could be using the MCO right now to take the best ever pictures of the "Face" and "Pyramids" in Cydonia as well as determine if Mars was abundantly covered with water in the past and where that water is now.
It takes an awful lot of time, energy and precision to get a spacecraft from one planet to another, many have failed while functioning on accurate data. To say that the data was calculated with mixed up units of measurements during one manoeuvre could be a very bad mistake, but to say that bad data was used since the launch of the entire mission is plainly an inconceivable error. The MCO would never have made it any where near Mars to start with!
On October 6th 1999, NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin named Arthur G. Stephenson, director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, to be the head of the Mars Climate Orbiter Mission Failure Investigation Board. The board will report its initial findings to NASA Headquarters by November 3rd 1999. Other members of the board are to be established soon. We will not know exactly what happened until the report is released. Assuming of course that this is a legitimant investigation.
Stay tuned....
