The high cost of not finding information (03 Mar 2004)

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The high cost of not finding information (03 Mar 2004)
On Sept 23, 1999, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft disappeared. The spacecraft had flown nine-and-a-half months and 416 million miles flawlessly. Scientists were stumped at first about what had gone wrong. They had checked and rechecked the calculations. It turned out that unbeknownst to the metric-based NASA, its contractor had submitted acceleration data in pounds of force instead of the metric equivalent, newtons. By not converting the pounds to the metric measurement, the spacecraft was lost. A costly information disaster. And an embarrassing one.

Article URL: http://www.kmworld.com/publications/magazine/index.cfm?action=readarticle&Article_ID=1725&Publication_ID=108

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