THE TRAGEDY OF MARS OBSERVER

摘要

The Mars Observer project was conceived by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the early 1980's as the first of a series of missions that would utilize commercially available earth orbital spacecraft adapted for deep space use. The spacecraft failed catastrophically on August 22, 1993, three days before reaching Mars. Subsequent failure investigations suggested a number of programmatic and technical flaws that may, or may not have contributed to the failure. NASA developed an action plan that called for significant programmatic and technical process changes to current and future projects to avoid additional tragedies like Mars Observer. This paper addresses the potential programmatic and technical flaws in the project, the lessons learned, and the changes that NASA applied to implement the lessons learned.