Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.com.au> writes: ... > The problem is, small misunderstandings like this can snowball > > Just look at that space mission where the Americans used imperial units > and the European scientists used metric units Not quite -- that was NASA (Metric) and Lockheed Martin (Imperial) so the divide seems to be between scientists and engineers, all US folk. As I understand it, the on-board software (NASA) was expecting numbers for the instructions to the thrusters in newton-seconds, whereas the navigation software (Lockheed Martin) was outputting numbers in pound-seconds, so every course correction had over 4 times the effect that they were expecting, with the result that they skimmed the atmosphere, overheating the propulsion system, and stopping the burn that was intended to enter orbit, so it probably went whizzing off past Mars. http://articles.cnn.com/1999-09-30/tech/9909_30_mars.metric.02_1_climate-orbiter-spacecraft-team-metric-system?_s=PM:TECH Cheers, Phil. -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] http://www.hands.com/ |-| HANDS.COM Ltd. http://www.uk.debian.org/ |(| 10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London E18 1NE ENGLAND
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