I imagine this was not something that would make King Gus happy. The ship foundered and sank after sailing about 1,300 metres into her maiden voyage on 10 August. It was commissioned by the King of Sweden, Gustavis Adolphus, and constructed by private entrepreneurs. The Vasa was a Swedish Warship completed in 1628. Hey presto! Farewell to an expensive orbiter! Oops! Metrology mistake 2: The Vasa Warship The spacecraft encountered Mars at a lower than anticipated altitude and disintegrated due to atmospheric stresses. And they couldn’t re-establish communication. When the spacecraft passed behind Mars 49 seconds earlier than it was meant to, the Mars Climate Orbiter went out of radio contact. This created a discrepancy between calculated and measured position, and the desired and actual orbit insertion altitude. As a result, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers mistook acceleration readings measured in units of pound-seconds for a metric measure of force, newton-seconds. Yep, you read that right! The Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the Metric system of millimetres and metres in its calculations, while Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, which designed and built the spacecraft, provided crucial acceleration data in the Imperial system of inches, feet and pounds. So how does one lose an expensive and large piece of equipment? Well, spacecraft engineers failed to convert from Imperial to Metric measurements. Now losing a Mars Climate orbiter is no small thing, it’s not like you can hide it down the couch. It was September 1999 and our focus was on the Y2K bug- remember that? NASA announced that it had lost its $125-million Mars Climate Orbiter. Metrology mistake 1: Mars Climate Orbiter

They’re sure to make you glad you’re good at your job. In honour of World Metrology Day which occurs on May 20th, we pulled together a list of the three most embarrassing mistakes in metrology in celebration of measurement scientists across the world.

Mars climate orbiter mistake