How could such a rudimentary error have occurred? Well, the Orbiter team at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was using metric units and the production team at Colorado's Lockheed Martin facility (where the Orbiter was built) were using English measuring units - and NOBODY noticed the discrepancy.
"People sometimes make errors. The problem here was not the error, it was the failure of ... the checks and balances in our processes to detect the error. That's why we lost the spacecraft." said Edward Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for space science.
I am a layman is such matters, but I have a real problem with this explanation. The Mars Climate Orbiter was able to get to Mars without a hitch, suggesting that it was successfully able to execute numerous orders during its perilous voyage. How could this sophisticated piece of technology have made it all the way to the red planet free of command and execution problems, then be destroyed by a single command at the end of its multi-million mile journey? With apologies to NASA, JPL and Lockeed Martin, the official explanation is extremely problematic.
American and Soviet Mars missions began in the early 1960's. Since then, there have been a combined total of 32, 18 of which have met with failure*. Most of these failed missions have never been well explained and some have never been explained at all! Certainly, space missions are risky enterprises, but Mars shots in particular have an outstandingly negative success record. Are Martians to blame? Possibly, but I doubt it. I do however feel there are things on Mars which our government does not want us to see. As such, it may well turn out that it is we who are selectively sabotaging our own missions to Mars, despite the havoc and negative PR is brings down on NASA and the billions of dollars of taxpayers money it wastes.
I know many may see this view as extreme, but for me the 'metric explanation' washes about as well as UFO's being swamp gas and the Roswell crash being a weather balloon. In any case, NASA has announced that the fate of the Mars Climate Orbiter is now being investigated by three separate review boards. We expect they will all come to the conclusion that the problem was caused by the aforementioned metric error.
___________________________ Footnotes:*See "Mars Missions Successes and Failures" http://www.ufocity.com/guest/ga-111.cfm
Also visit the website of the Mars Surface Anomaly Analysis Group which posts photographs of possible artifacts on Mars http://www.mufor.org/ares/
