{"href":"https://api.simplecast.com/oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcode-curiosities.simplecast.com%2Fepisodes%2Fthe-minus-sign-that-killed-a-mars-mission-3VyeNWOc","width":444,"version":"1.0","type":"rich","title":"The Minus Sign That Killed a Mars Mission","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_url":"https://image.simplecastcdn.com/images/96a10b54-3566-4ae1-87fd-fd8bff7bd182/bfe23177-168e-4560-8f89-ca617c79586a/code-20curiosities.jpg","thumbnail_height":300,"provider_url":"https://simplecast.com","provider_name":"Simplecast","html":"<iframe src=\"https://player.simplecast.com/ac0039d3-9e12-4dfe-baf8-ad9586f14326\" height=\"200\" width=\"100%\" title=\"The Minus Sign That Killed a Mars Mission\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>","height":200,"description":"In 1999, NASA lost a $327 million spacecraft because one engineering team was using metric units and another was using imperial — and nobody noticed until it was too late. We dig into the Mars Climate Orbiter disaster to explore how a single, silent unit mismatch burned up in a Martian atmosphere, and what it says about the terrifying assumptions we bake into the software systems we trust with our lives. Spoiler: it's not really a story about math."}