Quote:
Originally Posted by 3488
It was a double fiasco of the highest order, made worse by the fact that the Mars Climate Orbiter, was a fully functioning craft & was lost due to two teams who could not communicate the simple fact that one was working in imperial measurements & the other in Metric measurements. Talk about not getting your sums right.  |
The worst part of it for me was that the navigation team had some evidence that something was wrong, but management wouldn't listen to them.
That being said, it's worth keeping in mind that MCO and MPL combined cost significantly less than one rover - they were
very cheap missions, so not nearly as much was lost as if an MRO or MER had failed.