"The failure review board has identified other significant factors that allowed this error to be borne and then let it linger and propagate to the point where it resulted in a major error in our understanding of the spacecraft's path as it approached," said Arthur Stephenson, chairman of the Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board.

The mission team also failed to perform a final thruster firing and communications between team members were inadequate, the report said. The report also found the navigation team staffing, training and communications between project elements to be "inadequate." The team, which came to the mission about two months before launch assumed the orbiter was essentially the same as the Mars Global Surveyor, which it was not, the report finds.

Mission control computers had incorrectly gauged the velocity of the craft throughout the entire four-month trip from Earth to Mars.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory navigation team underestimated the path of the craft due to "multiple file format errors and incorrect (spacecraft attitude data) specifications."

These errors contributed to the team "not being able to quickly detect and investigate what would become the root cause," the report stated.

Click here to view a copy of the investigation board's report.

The spacecraft was lost and presumed destroyed when it shot within 40 miles of the martian surface as controllers were attempting to put it into orbit. At that altitude, the craft -- which was traveling at least 10,000 mph -- would have been torn apart in the planet's atmosphere. The minimum survivable altitude was about 53 miles (85 kilometers), mission operators said, while the original target altitude was about 125 miles (200 kilometers).

To view an animated movie of what likely happened to the Mars Climate Orbiter created for space.com by Analytical Graphics choose: low-res (294 Kb) or high-res (7.4 Mb).

The loss has complicated the mission of the Mars Polar Lander, which is on its way to Mars and scheduled to touch down Dec. 3. Mission officials insist that the same problems that doomed the orbiter will not affect the lander, but the two spacecrafts were part of the same mission and were designed to work together.

The climate orbiter was to have served as a communications and data relay station between the polar lander and Earth. Without the orbiter, controllers and mission scientists have had to scramble to redesign all the sequences of the lander's operations.

For live video of the NASA news conference about the failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter click here.