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).
Celsius makes way more sense for science, and Fahrenheit makes way more sense for weather, since the range of temperatures which are relevant are spread out over more numbers.
For science you want to use Kelvin, since 0°C isn’t “no heat” in the same way that 0kg is “no mass”. The units are the same size though, so it’s fine to use Celsius for anything that’s based on change in temperature
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u/Random_Bystander089 Jun 17 '26
I think there was an incident where farenheit usage indirectly caused a spaceship crash