January 14, 2009

When the Mars Climate Orbiter took off from Cape Canaveral in December 1998, the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena were undoubtedly elated.They were managing the project for NASA. It was a textbook launch and the spaceship was on its way to break new ground in mapping the red planet.

Nine months later though, it was only their red faces that were on show. The spaceship vanished. Instead of orbiting the planet, it had burnt up as it descended too low into the Martian atmosphere.