By Missing Line of Code, Probe Finds Video A NASA spokesman describes the likely fate of the Mars Polar Lander. Outside investigators announced these conclusions yesterday, as NASA's top scientist confirmed that the agency will cancel plans to launch a robot spacecraft in 2001 on a mission to land on Mars and indefinitely postpone all future launches to Mars, with one exception. A 2001 mission to send a craft to orbit the Red Planet is still on track. They were just young people.
Management has to take the blame.
The Mars Climate Orbiter was lost because contractor Lockheed Martin's Mars team in Denver forgot to convert from English to metric units, and NASA managers failed to catch the error. Also lost, along with the lander, were two piggybacking microprobes whose fate remains unknown. This left the latest Mars projects underfunded, understaffed and overstressed. The JPL team, for example, consisted of just 10 people, each working on a given function in relative isolation and putting in 80-hour weeks. There were scattered signals that something was wrong, investigators say, but the system failed to respond.