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Answer» What is Mars Climate Orbiter mean? The Mars Climate Orbiter (formerly the Mars Surveyor '98 Orbiter) was a 638-kilogram (1,407 lb) robotic space probe launched by NASA on December 11, 1998 to study the Martian climate, Martian atmosphere, and surface changes and to act as the communications relay in the Mars Surveyor '98 program for Mars Polar Lander. However, on September 23, 1999, communication with the spacecraft was permanently lost as it went into orbital insertion. The spacecraft encountered Mars on a trajectory that brought it too close to the planet, and it was either destroyed in the atmosphere or escaped the planet's vicinity and entered an orbit around the Sun. An investigation attributed the failure to a measurement mismatch between two software systems: metric units by NASA and US Customary (imperial or "English") units by spacecraft builder Lockheed Martin. reference
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