"Special attention is being directed at navigation and propulsion issues, and a fully independent 'red team' will review and approve the closure of all subsequent actions. "We have mobilized the very best talent at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to respond thoroughly to the specific recommendations in the board's report and the other areas of concern highlighted by the board," said Dr. Unfortunately for MCO, the root cause was not caught by the processes in place in the MCO project. However, sufficient processes are usually in place on projects to catch these mistakes before they become critical to mission success. The board recognizes that mistakes occur on spacecraft projects, the report said. Wide-ranging managerial and technical actions are underway at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, in response to the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter and the initial findings of the mission failure investigation board, whose first report was released today.įocused on the upcoming landing of NASA's Mars Polar Lander, these actions include: a newly assigned senior management leader, freshly reviewed and augmented work plans, detailed fault tree analyses for pending mission events, daily telecons to evaluate technical progress and plan work yet to be done, increased availability of the Deep Space Network for communications with the spacecraft, and independent peer review of all operational and contingency procedures.
MARS CLIMATE ORBITER FAILURE BOARD RELEASES REPORT, NUMEROUS NASA ACTIONS UNDERWAY IN RESPONSE This mistake triggered an unintentional de-orbit of the probe and its subsequent disintegration in Mars’ upper atmosphere. Case Study: In 1999, NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter, a 338 kg robotic space probe (with a cost of $327.6 million dollars) due to a failed translation of British units into metric units in the mission software.