Le portail francophone de la géomatique

Comment la NASA avait perdu en 1998 son Mars Climate Orbiter à cause de l'emploi d'unités de mesure anglo-saxonnes au lieu du bon vieux système métrique...
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Findings of the failure review board indicate that a navigation error resulted from some spacecraft commands being sent in English units instead of being converted to metric.

This caused the spacecraft to miss its intended 140 - 150 km altitude above Mars during orbit insertion, instead entering the martian atmosphere at about 57 km. The spacecraft would have been destroyed by atmospheric stresses and friction at this low altitude.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/Mas … =1998-073A