But the Lockheed team was using imperial units, so data passed between the two groups were interpreted incorrectly.

ECONOMIST: Mishaps in space: Foolish, not ghoulish | The

One, Mars Climate Orbiter, had a particularly humiliating crash, because the fault lay with a group of engineers who, in defiance of common sense, had continued to use imperial units of measurement in their calculations when all around had adopted the metric system.

ECONOMIST: Exploring Mars

Investigators have attributed the failed 1999 Climate Orbiter mission to human error: The flight software used metric units while the ground system that wrote the code used Imperial measures.

MSN: History littered with failed Mars probes