Mars Climate Orbiter

Mission

Kind: Mars orbiter

State: Spacecraft failure

Place: Mars

Operator: NASA / JPL

Date

Start:

Duration: 286 daysMission failure

Mission Ending

Last Contact: 23 September 1999 09:06:00 (1999-09-23UTC09:07Z) UTC

Rocket

Rocket: Delta II 7425

Kind: NASA / JPL

Manufacturer: Lockheed Martin

Mass: 638 kilograms (1,407 lb)

Launch Site: Cape Canaveral SLC-17A

Flyby

"Requesting permission for flyby." Maverick - Top Gun

Orbit

Reference System: Areocentric

Lander

"The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing." - Paul Theroux

The Mars Climate Orbiter (formerly the Mars Surveyor '98 Orbiter) was a 638-kilogram (1,407 lb) robotic space probe launched by NASA on December 11, 1998 to study the Martian climate, Martian atmosphere, and surface changes and to act as the communications relay in the Mars Surveyor '98 program for Mars Polar Lander. However, on September 23, 1999, communication with the spacecraft was lost as the spacecraft went into orbital insertion, due to ground-based computer software which produced output in non-SI units of pound-force seconds (lbf·s) instead of the SI units of newton-seconds (N·s) specified in the contract between NASA and Lockheed. The spacecraft encountered Mars on a trajectory that brought it too close to the planet, and it was either destroyed in the atmosphere or re-entered heliocentric space after leaving Mars' atmosphere.