Mars Climate Orbiter: Phase I Report

The MCO Mission objective was to orbit Mars as the first interplanetary weather satellite and provide a communications relay for the MPL which is due to reach Mars in December 1999. The MCO was launched on December 11, 1998, and was lost sometime following the spacecraft’s entry into Mars occultation during the Mars Orbit Insertion (MOI) maneuver. The spacecraft’s carrier signal was last seen at approximately 09:04:52 UTC on Thursday, September 23, 1999. The MCO MIB has determined that the root cause for the loss of the MCO spacecraft was the failure to use metric units in the coding of a ground software file, Small Forces, used in trajectory models.