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On September 23, 1999, NASA’s $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter approached the red planet under guidance from a team of flight controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The probe was one of several planned for Mars exploration, and would stay in orbit around the planet as the first extraterrestrial weather satellite. It had been in flight for over nine months, covering more than 415 million miles of empty space on its way to Mars. As the Orbiter reached its final destination, the flight controllers began to realize that something was wrong. They had planned for the probe to reach an orbit approximately 180 km off the surface of Mars – well beyond the planet’s thin atmosphere. But new calculations based on the current flight trajectory showed the Orbiter skimming within 60 km of the Martian surface. Now the probe would actually enter the planet’s thin atmosphere, something for which it was never designed. The consequences were catastrophic: when the scientists and engineers commanding the probe lost communication, they could only assume that the spacecraft was incinerated by the friction from an atmospheric entry that it was never supposed to make.

What caused this disaster? The problem arose in part from a simple, seemingly innocent, mistake. Throughout the journey from Earth, solar winds pushed against the solar panels of the probe, throwing the spacecraft off course by a small amount. The designers had planned for this, and jet thrusters were turned on by the flight controllers to apply a force, making numerous small corrections to readjust its course. Unfortunately, the NASAengineers measured this force in pounds (a non-metric unit), while the JPL team worked in Newtons (a metric unit), and the software that calculated how long the thrusters should be fired did not make the proper conversion. Since 1 pound = 4.45 Newtons, 4.45 times too much thrust was applied each time the thrusters were used. While each individual adjustment mistake was very small, this mistake grew larger and larger over multiple adjustments, resulting in the craft’s premature demise in the Martian atmosphere.

The Orbiter loss illustrates the need for consistent use of units. Most people, however, are most comfortable working in whatever units they grew up using. As a result, unit consistency may not be possible within or between teams around the world. Ideally, people should be comfortable with a variety of ways of converting units in order to allow for collaboration among individuals from a variety of backgrounds.

While most people are not controlling NASA space probes, unit conversion is something that happens every day, in all walks of life. Even such a simple problem as figuring out that two dozen eggs equals 24 eggs is, at its heart, a unit conversion problem. Whether you realize it or not, when you do this problem in your head, you’re figuring it out like this: