How a Single Math Error Caused a $500 Million Satellite to Crash

**Title: The Devastating Consequences of a Simple Math Mistake: NASA's Mars Satellite Disaster**

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**Introduction: A Costly Error in Space Exploration**

In 1999, NASA experienced a humiliating and costly disaster when a satellite intended for orbit around Mars catastrophically failed shortly after arrival. The culprit behind this failure was traced back to an elementary math error, underscoring the critical importance of precision in scientific endeavors. This incident serves as a stark reminder that even minor mistakes can lead to significant consequences, especially in fields like aerospace engineering.

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**The History of Measurement Systems: From Chaos to Order**

Before diving into the specifics of NASA's mishap, it's essential to understand the historical context surrounding measurement systems. Prior to the metric system, the world was a patchwork of inconsistent and often whimsical units of measurement. Each region used its own standards, leading to confusion and inefficiency in trade and scientific collaboration.

The metric system was first introduced in France during the 1790s as an organized response to this chaos. Its adoption spread rapidly across Europe, thanks in part to Napoleon's influence. By the 19th century, most European countries had embraced metric units. However, not everyone was on board. The English-speaking world, including the United Kingdom and its colonies, remained resistant, clinging to their customary system of pounds, inches, and yards.

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**The Global Adoption of the Metric System**

While many European nations swiftly adopted the metric system, other regions were slower to follow. Russia adopted it in 1918 following the Russian Revolution, while Japan and China embraced metric units in the 1920s. India transitioned after gaining independence from Britain. By the 1960s, all European countries had gone metric except for the UK and Ireland.

The English-speaking world's reluctance persisted, largely due to a preference for their traditional units and a sense of pride in their invention. The UK finally caved in 1965, followed by Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada in 1973. By 2019, every country had adopted the metric system except Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States.

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**The Metric System in the United States**

In the U.S., while the federal government adopted metric units for military and government use by 1975, private businesses continued to use customary systems. This dichotomy set the stage for the impending disaster in NASA's Mars mission.

NASA, adhering strictly to metric measurements, subcontracted with Lockheed Martin for satellite construction. Despite explicit contractual requirements to convert measurements to metric, Lockheed Martin persisted with customary units. The oversight led to a critical error: data from the satellite's thrusters was provided in pounds of force instead of newtons.

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**The Catastrophic Consequences: A Lesson in Precision**

NASA engineers reviewing Lockheed Martin's data failed to recognize the use of customary units, assuming all figures were metric. This oversight resulted in the satellite being miscalibrated. Instead of orbiting Mars at 150 kilometers, it descended to a perilous 57 kilometers, succumbing to the Martian atmosphere.

The loss was staggering—over $327 million (equivalent to $523 million today). This sum exceeded the annual salaries of nine thousand average Americans. The incident highlights the dire consequences of inconsistency in measurement systems and the importance of meticulous attention to detail in scientific endeavors.

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**Learning from Mistakes: Enhancing Math and Engineering Skills**

While this disaster is disheartening, it offers valuable lessons. It underscores that even highly-trained professionals can make simple mistakes with profound repercussions. The silver lining is the opportunity for growth through error analysis.

Resources like Brilliant.org offer courses in gravitational physics and daily challenges to enhance math and engineering skills. By engaging with such platforms, learners can master concepts through practical application, building a robust understanding of orbital mechanics and beyond.

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**Conclusion: Embracing Precision for Success**

The story of NASA's Mars satellite serves as a cautionary tale about the importance of consistency in measurement systems and the need for vigilance in technical fields. While the English system may still hold cultural significance, the metric system's universal adoption is crucial for global collaboration and scientific progress.

Investing time in improving math and engineering skills can prevent such costly mistakes. Through persistent learning and application, we can move from curiosity to mastery, ensuring that future endeavors are built on a foundation of precision and accuracy.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis video was made possible by brilliant learn complex subjects simply at brilliant org slash real-life floor math is hard but at least you probably have never made a math mistake that cost her company hundreds of millions of dollars in damages not everybody can be so lucky as you though you see back in 1999 NASA tried getting a satellite into orbit around Mars but it caught on fire and blew up immediately when it arrived they traced the problem back to a single math error that was probably caused by a small group of people who would all probably be jealous of whatever the biggest mistake that you think you've ever made was but in order to understand how the math error was made and why it costs so much money and time we need to take a history lesson in communist units also known as the metric system before the metric system the world was ruled by chaos and everybody used a different system for measuring things based on whatever the hell they felt like basically but all of that too began to change in France where the metric system was first invented in the 1790s when the people decided to invent a new system that you know actually made some sense a guy named Napoleon came around and started conquering stuff in spreading the metric system around like it was some kind of disease Germany and Italy were both made up of a bunch of different independent countries at the time who each used their own different crazy forms of measuring things and that was difficult for one simple reason imagine for a moment that you live in Bavaria and you need to trade a bag of potatoes for a pig with some guy in Prussia you weigh your potatoes in units of Toyota Corollas well the guy you're trading with in Prussia not only doesn't know what the hell that even is but he also measures things by weighing them in units of the clay brick that some keying a hundred years ago decided was the standard that is confusing and if you throw in even more weirdos with their other weird systems of weighing things you can see how it gets even worse so trading with people sucks but what if we could just abandon our own systems and all just use a brand-new system of measuring things that we all will have in common and we'll all have to learn so it's fair I don't know that sounds like communism set England but I don't know that sounds pretty great said Germany and Italy who both promptly adopted it after France and so metric became the hot new fad across Europe and it spread from there to all of their colonies which was basically everywhere France Spain Portugal Germany Italy the Netherlands Austria and the Ottomans all adopted metric in the 19th century but other countries took a little bit longer Russia adopted it in 1918 after the Russian Revolution Japan and China picked it up in the 1920s in India picked it up basically right after they got independence from Britain by the 1960s every country in Europe had adopted the metric system except for the United Kingdom and Ireland the english-speaking world has always been the slowest community in the world to adopt metric mostly because we think that the English invented units of pounds and inches and yards makes more sense for some reason and also because the English invented that system and not the gross French anyway the UK finally said fine in 1965 and caved in an adopted metric Ireland followed suit a few years later as did New Zealand Australia and finally Canada in 1973 by the current year in 2019 every single country in the entire world except for three of them have adopted the metric system and those three are Myanmar Liberia and the United States which is the last english-speaking country holdout that hasn't caved in yet the metric system has had a rather complicated history in the United States the federal government adopted it as the official system of measurement for the military and government agencies back in 1975 but the vast majority of people and private businesses still to this day use the English customary system and this is where the history lesson leads us back to the engineering disaster in 1999 as a US federal government agency nASA uses the metric system to conduct all of their business but as a private business their subcontractor Lockheed Martin was still using the customary system NASA explicitly specified in their contract that all of their subcontractors had to convert their measurements into metric but apparently Lockheed Martin looked at that and then decided that they wouldn't Lockheed Martin designed and built the satellite but they provided NASA years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with data from the onboard thrusters in units of force in pounds rather than in the metric mutants the NASA engineers looked at Lockheed's data for the thrusters notice that it didn't say anywhere hey guys customary units here and so they assumed that it was all in metric and just carried on the satellite was launched without anybody noticing that and after ten months of traveling and over three hundred and twenty seven million dollars being spent on the mission or five hundred and twenty three million dollars in today's money more than the combined annual salaries of nine thousand average Americans the satellite was destroyed in a matter of seconds the satellite was supposed to orbit Mars at a distance of 150 kilometers but because of the conversion error in the thrusters it actually descended down to just 57 kilometers above the Martian surface and proceeded to burn up in the atmosphere the lesson here is that math is equally difficult for everyone and even highly-trained scientists and engineers at the highest levels of their professions can sometimes make the simplest of mistakes that cause unbelievable amounts of damage the good news is that there's always a lesson in a mistake you always learn how not to do it the next time and true to form NASA hasn't made a conversion error this catastrophic ever since so there's no reason to feel ashamed if math and engineering are concepts that you want to be better at but you're struggling with right now I'm certainly not a scientist nor an engineer but I am a fan of both disciplines and I love learning more about them through courses like brilliance class on gravitational physics which will teach you everything that you need to know about orbital mechanics and how to successfully get a satellite up into orbit without blowing it up or you could complete one of brilliance daily challenges every day really it presents you with interesting scientific and mathematical problems to test your brain and each one provides you with the context and framework that you need to tackle it so that you learn the concepts by actually applying them and if you like the problem and want to learn more there's a course quiz that explores the same concept in greater detail and if you get confused there's an entire community of thousands of other learners discussing them and writing solutions slow and steady you can go from curiosity to mastery one day at a time so if you're feeling inspired and you like to spend your time educating yourself go ahead and visit brilliant org slash real life lor and sign up for free and the first 500 people that go to that link will also get 20% off of their annual premium subscription which gives you access to all of their courses and challenges you can really learn a lot and support real-life law at the same time and as always thank you for watchingthis video was made possible by brilliant learn complex subjects simply at brilliant org slash real-life floor math is hard but at least you probably have never made a math mistake that cost her company hundreds of millions of dollars in damages not everybody can be so lucky as you though you see back in 1999 NASA tried getting a satellite into orbit around Mars but it caught on fire and blew up immediately when it arrived they traced the problem back to a single math error that was probably caused by a small group of people who would all probably be jealous of whatever the biggest mistake that you think you've ever made was but in order to understand how the math error was made and why it costs so much money and time we need to take a history lesson in communist units also known as the metric system before the metric system the world was ruled by chaos and everybody used a different system for measuring things based on whatever the hell they felt like basically but all of that too began to change in France where the metric system was first invented in the 1790s when the people decided to invent a new system that you know actually made some sense a guy named Napoleon came around and started conquering stuff in spreading the metric system around like it was some kind of disease Germany and Italy were both made up of a bunch of different independent countries at the time who each used their own different crazy forms of measuring things and that was difficult for one simple reason imagine for a moment that you live in Bavaria and you need to trade a bag of potatoes for a pig with some guy in Prussia you weigh your potatoes in units of Toyota Corollas well the guy you're trading with in Prussia not only doesn't know what the hell that even is but he also measures things by weighing them in units of the clay brick that some keying a hundred years ago decided was the standard that is confusing and if you throw in even more weirdos with their other weird systems of weighing things you can see how it gets even worse so trading with people sucks but what if we could just abandon our own systems and all just use a brand-new system of measuring things that we all will have in common and we'll all have to learn so it's fair I don't know that sounds like communism set England but I don't know that sounds pretty great said Germany and Italy who both promptly adopted it after France and so metric became the hot new fad across Europe and it spread from there to all of their colonies which was basically everywhere France Spain Portugal Germany Italy the Netherlands Austria and the Ottomans all adopted metric in the 19th century but other countries took a little bit longer Russia adopted it in 1918 after the Russian Revolution Japan and China picked it up in the 1920s in India picked it up basically right after they got independence from Britain by the 1960s every country in Europe had adopted the metric system except for the United Kingdom and Ireland the english-speaking world has always been the slowest community in the world to adopt metric mostly because we think that the English invented units of pounds and inches and yards makes more sense for some reason and also because the English invented that system and not the gross French anyway the UK finally said fine in 1965 and caved in an adopted metric Ireland followed suit a few years later as did New Zealand Australia and finally Canada in 1973 by the current year in 2019 every single country in the entire world except for three of them have adopted the metric system and those three are Myanmar Liberia and the United States which is the last english-speaking country holdout that hasn't caved in yet the metric system has had a rather complicated history in the United States the federal government adopted it as the official system of measurement for the military and government agencies back in 1975 but the vast majority of people and private businesses still to this day use the English customary system and this is where the history lesson leads us back to the engineering disaster in 1999 as a US federal government agency nASA uses the metric system to conduct all of their business but as a private business their subcontractor Lockheed Martin was still using the customary system NASA explicitly specified in their contract that all of their subcontractors had to convert their measurements into metric but apparently Lockheed Martin looked at that and then decided that they wouldn't Lockheed Martin designed and built the satellite but they provided NASA years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with data from the onboard thrusters in units of force in pounds rather than in the metric mutants the NASA engineers looked at Lockheed's data for the thrusters notice that it didn't say anywhere hey guys customary units here and so they assumed that it was all in metric and just carried on the satellite was launched without anybody noticing that and after ten months of traveling and over three hundred and twenty seven million dollars being spent on the mission or five hundred and twenty three million dollars in today's money more than the combined annual salaries of nine thousand average Americans the satellite was destroyed in a matter of seconds the satellite was supposed to orbit Mars at a distance of 150 kilometers but because of the conversion error in the thrusters it actually descended down to just 57 kilometers above the Martian surface and proceeded to burn up in the atmosphere the lesson here is that math is equally difficult for everyone and even highly-trained scientists and engineers at the highest levels of their professions can sometimes make the simplest of mistakes that cause unbelievable amounts of damage the good news is that there's always a lesson in a mistake you always learn how not to do it the next time and true to form NASA hasn't made a conversion error this catastrophic ever since so there's no reason to feel ashamed if math and engineering are concepts that you want to be better at but you're struggling with right now I'm certainly not a scientist nor an engineer but I am a fan of both disciplines and I love learning more about them through courses like brilliance class on gravitational physics which will teach you everything that you need to know about orbital mechanics and how to successfully get a satellite up into orbit without blowing it up or you could complete one of brilliance daily challenges every day really it presents you with interesting scientific and mathematical problems to test your brain and each one provides you with the context and framework that you need to tackle it so that you learn the concepts by actually applying them and if you like the problem and want to learn more there's a course quiz that explores the same concept in greater detail and if you get confused there's an entire community of thousands of other learners discussing them and writing solutions slow and steady you can go from curiosity to mastery one day at a time so if you're feeling inspired and you like to spend your time educating yourself go ahead and visit brilliant org slash real life lor and sign up for free and the first 500 people that go to that link will also get 20% off of their annual premium subscription which gives you access to all of their courses and challenges you can really learn a lot and support real-life law at the same time and as always thank you for watching\n"