An investigation panel will present its report on the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter during a briefing Wednesday at NASA headquarters.
The report on the loss of the $125 million spacecraft will likely be a sharp rebuke to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory just as it rushes to finalize efforts to successfully land a companion mission, the Polar Lander, on Mars on December 3.
Preliminary findings into the loss of the mission indicate that NASA engineers mistook measurements supplied by Lockheed Martin Astronautics in English units for metric units. The discrepancy resulted in a trajectory that either slammed the spacecraft into the surface of Mars or put it into orbit around the sun.
However, the report is expected to delve into not just the error itself, but its root causes and how similar errors can be avoided with the Mars Polar Lander, now just weeks away from its scheduled touchdown near the planet's south pole. JPL manages -- or managed -- both projects, whose mission teams largely overlapped.
"There are things that went wrong - I'm sure the stories on that will come out that will have implications both technically and managerially," said Louis Friedman, executive director of The Planetary Society, a Pasadena, California-based space exploration advocacy group. "But right now everyone is focused on Mars Polar Lander."
The briefing will include comment from Edward Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for space science; Edward Stone, JPL director and Art Stephenson, Marshall Space Flight Center director and chairman of the Mars Climate Orbiter Mission Failure Investigation Board.
A second report by the board will be completed by February 1 and will cover what lessons have been learned from the mission's loss, as well as recommendations on how NASA can reduce the likelihood of similar incidents on future missions.
Many of those lessons from Climate Orbiter have already sunk in, said Brian Muirhead, a former member of the 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission who has been serving on a so-called "red team," or oversight panel to ensure Polar Lander goes off without a hitch.
"The team is, in general, very focused on Polar Lander. With Mars Climate Orbiter, I think, they have digested the lessons from that," Muirhead said. "That class of problems will not be repeated."
As for the cause of the failure, the scuttlebutt this week at JPL is that members of the navigational team routinely fudged readings in the spacecraft's position attributable to various small forces as it made its way to Mars from Earth. The tiny adjustments to those errors gradually built up over months, eventually putting the spacecraft an estimated 60 miles (96 kilometers) too close to Mars, dooming it.
"They kept adjusting it, adjusting it, adjusting it, so it got to the point they took out all the error," said one JPL insider. "If someone had looked more closely at it, they could have caught it."
What the fallout from the report will be -- other than far more scrutiny being paid to the Polar Lander in the immediate term -- is anyone's guess, said one analyst.
"It's evident that in cutting costs, they have been cutting corners and there is no physical way you can get it right the first time. But in faster, better, cheaper (with more missions being launched) there is more opportunity for continuous improvement," said John Pike, director of space policy for the Federation of American Scientists. "So depending on which side your bread is buttered, it says faster, better, cheaper is either a good idea or it's not."
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