{"id":351,"date":"2009-09-23T09:50:12","date_gmt":"2009-09-23T09:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress65\/?p=351"},"modified":"2009-09-23T09:50:12","modified_gmt":"2009-09-23T09:50:12","slug":"difficult-space-anniversary-mars-mission-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/difficult-space-anniversary-mars-mission-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"A Difficult Space Anniversary: Mars Mission Failure"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Difficult Space Anniversary: Mars Mission Failure<\/p>\n

Ten years ago today — September 23, 1999 — the Mars Climate Orbiter<\/a> spacecraft fired its main engine to go into orbit around Mars. The maneuver was unsuccessful, however, due to a navigation error. The spacecraft was lost. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The “navigation error” — i.e., the root cause of the failure — was contention between English units and metric units in the ground-based navigation software. It was a glitch in the program, and could be considered a systems engineering failure or a configuration management failure in that the error crept in because two different teams — the Colorado-based spacecraft team and the California-based mission navigation team — used two different measurement systems.<\/p>\n

The spacecraft had been launched on a Delta-II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on December 11, 1998.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

While I’m at it, and for no better reason than that I’m pleased with the work I did on it, here’s a link to the newly-updated North Carolina Aerospace Initiative<\/a> web site.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>by <\/span>\"feather\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Difficult Space Anniversary: Mars Mission Failure Ten years ago today — September 23, 1999 — the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft fired its main engine to go into orbit around Mars. The maneuver was unsuccessful, however, due to a navigation error. The spacecraft was lost. The “navigation error” — i.e., \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[85,37,11],"class_list":["post-351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space","tag-mars","tag-nasa","tag-space-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}