Artist's depiction of the Mars Climate Orbiter. Click on image for full size (18K JPG) Courtesy of NASA

The loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter has turned into a nightmare for NASA. The agency has released information blaming a mistake in measurements as the cause of the mishap.

The problem occurred when a team at Lockheed Martin submitted acceleration data in pounds of force. Unfortunately, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory assumed the numbers were in metric newtons. In other words, there was a mistake made in the units.

``It was embedded in the system from the beginning,'' said Tom Gavin, deputy director of JPL's space and Earth science program. ``We're still looking at why it was not detected.''

``People sometimes make errors,'' said Edward Weiler, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's associate administrator for space science. ``The problem here was not the error, it was the failure of ... the checks and balances in our processes to detect the error. That's why we lost the spacecraft.''

The spacecraft was lost when it flew too close to the Red Planet. It was supposed to study Mars' climate for 687 days. Scientists believe the orbiter burned up in Mars' atmosphere.

Artist's depiction of the Mars Climate Orbiter. Click on image for full size (18K JPG) Courtesy of NASA

The loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter has turned into a nightmare for NASA. The agency says an error in measurements caused the disaster.

The problem occurred when a team at Lockheed Martin submitted acceleration data in pounds of force. Unfortunately, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory assumed the numbers were in metric newtons. In other words, there was a mistake made in the units.

``It was embedded in the system from the beginning,'' said Tom Gavin, deputy director of JPL's space and Earth science program. ``We're still looking at why it was not detected.''

The spacecraft was lost when it flew too close to the Red Planet. It was supposed to study Mars' climate for 687 days. Scientists believe the orbiter burned up in Mars' atmosphere.

Artist's depiction of the Mars Climate Orbiter. Click on image for full size (18K JPG) Courtesy of NASA

NASA says they caused the Mars Climate Orbiter to burn up. Scientists confused the units when finding the right orbit. The orbiter got too close to the Red Planet and blew up.

The spacecraft would have studied Mars' weather for one Mars year, which is 687 days. Now, scientists are trying to find out how they could have made the mistake.