A simple oversight in converting English units to metric units during the 1999 Mars Orbiter mission led to the loss of a $125 million NASA spacecraft. On September 23rd of that year, the spacecraft was pulled into the Mars atmosphere where the stresses crippled it sending it into an uncharted orbit around the sun. The importance of interoperability was demonstrated on the world stage when the error was found to be due to a communications gap between two separate ground command crews in California and Colorado using two different measurement systems.
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