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36、回答36-41题
An Expensive Mistake
Is there water on the planet Mars? Is there life on Mars? Was there ever life on Mars? Scientists from NASA wanted to know the answers to these questions. They built a spacecraft to travel around Mars and get information. The spacecraft was called the Mars Climate Orbiter.
The Mars Climate Orbiter left for Mars in December 1998. The trip took nine and a half months. At first, everything was fine. However, when the Orbiter got near Mars, something terrible happened. The spacecraft didnt go to the right place. It went too close to Mars. It was too hot for the Orbiter there. The spacecraft couldnt function correctly. Suddenly, it stopped sending messages to NASA. The Orbiter was lost.
How could this terrible thing happen? How did the Orbiter get closer to Mars than the scientists planned? Finally, they found the answer. Two teams of scientists worked together on the Orbiter. One team was in England , and one team was in the United States . There were many similarities in the way they worked, but there was one important difference: The teams used different guidelines for measuring things. The United States team used the metric system( 公制 ). The other team used the English system.
Because they used different systems, the scientists made a mathematical mistake. The Orbiters orbit (the shape and pattern of its path) around Mars was not correct. The scientists put the Orbiter on the wrong path. The Orbiter got too close and too hot, and it stopped functioning.
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