Martian Climate Orbiter

Write the units In 1999, the 125 million Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft was lost when it entered the Martian atmosphere 100 km lower than planned. The navigation error would have been avoided if people had labeled their units of measurement. Engineers who built the spacecraft calculated thrust in the English unit, pounds of force. Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers thought they were receiving the information in the metric unit, newtons. Nobody caught the error. 

In 1999, NASA lost the 125 million Mars Climate Orbiter. The chairman of the conunis-sion that investigated the disaster concluded, The root cause of the loss of the spacecraft was a failed translation of English units into metric units. As a result, the orbiter—which was supposed to monitor weather on Mars—descended too far into the Martian atmosphere and burned up. In chemistry as in space exploration, units—standard quantities used to specify measurements— are critical. If we get them wrong, the consequences can be disastrous. 

A The 125 million Mars Climate Orbiter was lost in the Martian atmosphere in 1999 because two groups of engineers failed to communicate to each other the units that they used in their calculations. 

The extensive layered sediments at the south pole, which contain water ice, will provide information on climatic variations. The subsurface sounding radar instrument SHARAD (Shallow Radar) on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter carried out a detailed cartographic study of the subsurface at the Martian south pole. The data indicate that the sediments there have been subjected to considerable erosion (R. Seu et al 2007). The density of the material deposited at the Martian south pole was calculated by M. T. Zuber and co-workers by combining data from the gravitational field with those from various instruments on board the Mars Orbiter, they obtained a value of 1,200 kg/m3. This value corresponds to that calculated for water ice containing about 15% dust (Zuber et al 2007). 

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