Human error blamed for Mars probe's loss

[Hero]

Human error triggered a cascade of events that caused the battery to fail on the Mars Global Surveyor last year, according to a preliminary report released Friday.

An internal NASA board determined that power loss likely doomed the spacecraft after a decade of meticulously mapping the Red Planet.

But the problems actually began in 2005 when a routine technical update to onboard computers caused inconsistencies in the spacecraft's memory. The board concluded that engineers didn't catch the mistakes because the existing procedures to do so were inadequate.

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[The Helper]

How much money have we lost on errors in trying to do stuff for Mars? I remember one probe we sent just disappeared completely.

 

[Rinpun]

We should just stop. It doesn't help us that much anyway. We don't need any more space to move our population; we just need more resources, and Mars doesn't seem to have much.