Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board Phase I Report

Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board. (1999). Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board Phase I Report.

Retired. This is not a bibliographic entry. Our extractor captured an inline prose definition from an article and stored it as a work. The concept is real; this registry record is a parsing defect. This entry is kept so the citations that pointed at it still resolve, and so the correction is visible rather than silent.

Type

Report

Intellectual base

Grey literature

Year

1999

Link

no authoritative link yet

Cited by

5 citations across 5 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Mechanisms

• Parametric Dimension-Constraint Model
  • Guard the propagation path, because a single wrong dependency or unit spreads everywhere — the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter to a units mismatch is the standing warning.

    This sourceFinds that an English-versus-metric mismatch in transferred ground-software data produced accumulating trajectory error and the loss of Mars Climate Orbiter, and recommends verifying units and transferred-data interfaces.

• Unit Check
  • … precisely the class of failure that a unit check exists to catch, and its most famous instance is a spacecraft: two teams exchanged a thrust figure where one used pound-force seconds and the other assumed newton-seconds, the labels were never reconciled, and the mismatch went undetected all the way to the encounter.
• Unit Conversion Crosswalk
  • The archetypal catastrophe is a unit mismatch: NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter was lost in 1999 because two teams exchanged spacecraft data in mismatched units — imperial pound-force-seconds versus metric newton-seconds — with no conversion between them.
• Unit Conversion Table
  • And a plain unit mismatch that goes unconverted is the classic catastrophic error: the loss of NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter was traced to one system supplying impulse data in pound-force-seconds while another expected newton-seconds.

    This sourceAttributes the Mars Climate Orbiter loss to unconverted pound-force-seconds being supplied where newton-seconds were expected.

• Unit Normalization Table
  • The most famous instance is the loss of NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter, where one system produced impulse in pound-force-seconds while another consumed it as newton-seconds, and the unconverted mismatch sent the craft into the atmosphere.

    This sourceDocuments a pound-force-second/newton-second mismatch that corrupted navigation and led to the Mars Climate Orbiter's loss.

Verification

Does it exist? Not checked yet. This entry carries no identifier to resolve. It was extracted from the citation as written in the article, normalized, and deduplicated against the rest of the registry.

Does it back the claim? Not recorded. Neither this nor any other of the 5 citations of this work carries a recorded support check.

Was it audited? Yes. A second, independent pass read the citation against the article text and recorded a verdict.

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 2 other ways.

• https://discovery.larc.nasa.gov/pdf_files/MCO_report_2.pdf ×3
• https://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/641 ×2

Registry ID ref:d9f9d3e1428a · see in the full table