Think outside the box

I've learned about the SI units; metres, litres, and Newtons during my A-Levels years and I reckon that most of you are familiar with the SI units. However as told by my Mechanics lecturer during my first semester, given the extent of the engineering industry we will have to become familiar with US Customary Units and Imperial units as well or at least be able to convert between them. And guess what, this is something even NASA got it wrong! Ahaa.

In 1998, the Mars Climate Orbiter reached Mars and was designed to orbit the planet and collect weather data. The Lockheed Martin engineers were using Feet and the NASA engineers were using metres, so from here a navigation error occured because they had problem converting the units. The Mars Climate Orbiter was destroyed when the navigation error caused it to miss its target altitude at Mars by 80 to 90 km, instead entering the martian atmosphere at an altitude of 57 km during the orbit insertion maneuver.

Okay, this is another story told by my design lecturer, Geoff about the eagerness of NASA upon designing new stuff. NASA astronauts found that pens don't work in space. They found out that it was due to the difference in gravity, pressure, temperature etc. so the ink won't flow. Having said that, NASA undertook a major R&D program to design a light-weight, high-tech pen which the ink could flow at any angle and under conditions of zero gravity. The end result was successful, epic - the pen can write upside down, under water, over grease, in freezing cold, boiling heat, and in outer space. The pen features its own pressurized ink cartridge and all up, it has been said that this R&D project cost around USD 2 000 000!

And what did the Russians do? They used a pencil. :D