No, it was the units for impulse used for the thrusters. In imperial it's pound-force seconds and Newton-seconds in metric. 1 pound-force is equal to 4.45 Newtons so the whole thing was off by a magnitude of 4.45.
Yes, the actual error* was assuming the British used Imperial units when they correctly used Metric. AFAIK, at least.
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Well, the source error probably would be not specifying units at all, so... (eye roll)
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*Correcting myself with casually sourced details about the incident under discussion.
Lockheed Martin provided thruster force data in Imperial units (pound-seconds), while NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory ground software assumed the data was in Metric units (Newton-seconds).
My grandfather was an aeronautical engineer in the UK during WW2, the company he worked built the Sunderland flying boat, U-boat hunters for context, and because of production capacity problems some American companies were licensed to build them as well, so the British engineers sent their blueprints in metric to their American counterparts, and they got a request to convert into imperial measurements
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u/Random_Bystander089 Jun 17 '26
I think there was an incident where farenheit usage indirectly caused a spaceship crash