SPACE.com -- Lockheed Martin Accepts Blame for Root Cause of Craft's Loss


	Lockheed Martin Accepts Blame for Root Cause of Craft's Loss By Daniel Sorid Staff Writer posted: 04:23 pm ET 10 November 1999

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Lockheed Martin accepted responsibility for the fundamental cause of the loss of NASA's $250 million Mars Climate Orbiter last month -- but not the full blame -- a company official said in an interview Wednesday.

Dr. Noel Hinners, vice president of flight systems for Lockheed Martin Astronautics, said that while the Lockheed Martin team incorrectly programmed the Mars Climate Orbiter with English units instead of metric units, quality checks by both NASA and the company should have caught the error.

"We were responsible for the basic, root cause of not putting in the proper conversion units," Hinners said in a telephone interview. "There were abundant opportunities to have found the error along the way by both the rest of our people and [NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory]."

NASA lost contact with the spacecraft after its arrival at Mars on September 23, and has since theorized that the craft either burned up in the martian atmosphere or ricocheted into a useless orbit.

The consequences for Lockheed Martin could be significant. NASA will likely cut down the amount of money the company would have earned for its participation in the project because of the Climate Orbiter's loss, Hinners said.

Lockheed Martin is also playing a major role in NASA's Mars Polar Lander, expected to touch down on the martian surface on December 3. The company has assigned five to 10 employees who would have been working on the Climate Orbiter to assist the Polar Lander team, Hinners said.

Hinners said the company would postpone a decision on whether to fire or re-assign any employees until after the Polar Lander mission.

A NASA review team released a report Wednesday identifying the conversion units error as the fundamental cause of the loss of the Climate Orbiter.

Calculations made by Lockheed Martin that were used to program the craft's trajectory had been input with English units, while operation documents called for metric units, the report found.

Hinners said the wrong units might have been used as early as 1997.