Today I Learned (TIL)

6522 readers

2 users here now

You learn something new every day; what did you learn today?

/c/til is a community for any true knowledge that you would like to share, regardless of topic or of source.

Share your knowledge and experience!

Rules

Information must be true
Follow site rules
No, you don't have to have literally learned the fact today
Posts must be about something you learned

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Kokomheart@lemmy.ca

JCSpark@lemmy.ca

112

TIL that NASA lost a $330m Mars Orbiter in 1999, immediately before mars orbit was achieved, because one of the contracted US companies used imperial units instead of metric. (everydayastronaut.com)

submitted 5 months ago by partybot@lemmy.ca to c/til@lemmy.ca

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 34 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I think literally every time I had a science teacher want to drill into student's heads the importance of including units in one's physics or chemistry calculations, they brought up this story. I wonder what example they used before this

[–] Iapar@feddit.de 21 points 5 months ago

None, that's why it happened to NASA.