Notorious Software Errors

• Mars Climate Orbiter (1999) - The 125 million dollar Mars Climate Orbiter is assumed lost by officials at NASA. The failure responsible for loss of the orbiter is attributed to a failure of NASA’s system engineer process. The process did not specify the system of measurement to be used on the project. As a result, one of the development teams used Imperial measurement while the other used the metric system of measurement. When parameters from one module were passed to another during orbit navigation correct, no conversion was performed, resulting in the loss of the craft. http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/orbiter/