Case Study: In 1999, NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter, a 338 kg robotic space probe (with a cost of $327.6 million dollars) due to a failed translation of British units into metric units in the mission software. This mistake triggered an unintentional de-orbit of the probe and its subsequent disintegration in Mars upper atmosphere.

Read NASA's release "Mars Climate Orbiter Failure Board Releases Report, numerous NASA actions underway in response" (http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/news/mco991110.html)

The board's report cites the following contributing factors:

1. Errors went undetected within ground-based computer models of how small thruster firings on the spacecraft were predicted and then carried out on the spacecraft during its interplanetary trip to Mars

2. The operational navigation team was not fully informed on the details of the way that Mars Climate Orbiter was pointed in space, as compared to the earlier Mars Global Surveyor mission

3. A final, optional engine firing to raise the spacecraft?s path relative to Mars before its arrival was considered but not performed for several interdependent reasons

4. The systems engineering function within the project that is supposed to track and double-check all interconnected aspects of the mission was not robust enough, exacerbated by the first-time handover of a Mars-bound spacecraft from a group that constructed it and launched it to a new, multi-mission operations team

5. Some communications channels among project engineering groups were too informal

6. The small mission navigation team was oversubscribed and its work did not receive peer review by independent experts

7. Personnel were not trained sufficiently in areas such as the relationship between the operation of the mission and its detailed navigational characteristics, or the process of filing formal anomaly reports

8. The process to verify and validate certain engineering requirements and technical interfaces between some project groups, and between the project and its prime mission contractor, was inadequate

Which quality approaches, methods and tools would you propose to mitigate each of the 8 contributing factors identified in the release?

Which considerations would you take in order to implement your proposals within the organization?