It was while she was a graduate student at Cambridge, working under the direction of Antony Hewish, that Jocelyn discovered pulsars. Later that same year she began work on her Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of Glasgow. Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born in Belfast in 1943, at a time when science was not a subject commonly studied by girls. Even at the highest level errors happen and can go unnoticed, proving that attention to detail is always paramount.
The world looked on, amazed that the NASA engineers didn’t catch the mistake.
As a result, the Mars Climate Orbiter likely disintegrated due to atmospheric pressure.
MARS CLIMATE ORBITER MISTAKE SOFTWARE
The software being used calculated the force the thrusters needed to exert in pounds, then a separate piece of software took in the data assuming it was in metric units or newtons-a factor of four and a half difference! Their planned approach of the planet, at an altitude of about 150 kilometres, was therefore off and it hit Mars’ atmosphere at an altitude of about 60 kilometres. The error was that one team used imperial units while the other used metric. They announced in a statement that, “people sometimes make errors.” After a week of investigations, NASA finally revealed what happened to the 125 million dollar spacecraft. A day later they abandoned their search and it was logged as a failed mission. On September 23rd 1999, NASA issued a press release stating that the Mars Climate Orbiter was believed to be lost. The Mars Climate Orbiter was a robotic space probe launched by NASA on December 11th 1998 to study the climate, atmosphere and surface changes on Mars.
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