NASA / Lockheed Martin
Mars Climate Orbiter Unit Conversion Failure
Estimated impact: $125M spacecraft destroyed
The $125M Mars Climate Orbiter was destroyed when it entered Mars' atmosphere at too low an altitude. The root cause was a unit mismatch: Lockheed Martin's software output thrust data in pound-force-seconds while NASA's navigation software expected newton-seconds.
Decision context
Whether NASA's verification and validation process should have caught the unit mismatch during the 9-month cruise phase, during which trajectory deviations were observed but attributed to other causes.
Decision anatomy
Red = risk factor present · Green = protective factor present
Biases present in the decision
★ Primary driver · Severity estimated from bias type and decision outcome
Toxic combinations
Reference class base rates
Across all 143 curated case studies in our library:
Lessons learned
- Cognitive misering: trajectory deviations during the cruise phase were observed but corrected without investigating root cause
- Confirmation bias: engineers assumed the navigation model was correct and attributed discrepancies to solar radiation pressure
- Interface specification reviews between contractors and NASA were insufficient — unit conventions were not explicitly verified
Source: NASA Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board Phase I Report (1999) (Post Mortem)
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Workflows that fire on decisions like NASA / Lockheed Martin’s
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