Originally Posted by Scienceguy

Looks like madsci.org needs to do a little recalculating. Thanks for catching that, knotlob. I heard about a rocket that was supposed to go to Venus but the silly thing wound up on the ocean floor on terra . . . well, maybe not firma, but it lever left the Earth's atmosphere. The reason was that a minus sign was apparently in the program where it shouldn't have been.

Look here: "MARINER 1, the first U.S. attempt to send a spacecraft to Venus, failed
minutes after launch in 1962. The guidance instructions from the ground
stopped reaching the rocket due to a problem with its antenna, so the
onboard computer took control. However, there turned out to be a bug in
the guidance software, and the rocket promptly went off course, so the
Range Safety Officer destroyed it. Although the bug is sometimes claimed
to have been an incorrect FORTRAN DO statement, it was actually a
transcription error in which the bar (indicating smoothing) was omitted
from the expression "R-dot-bar sub n" (nth smoothed value of derivative
of radius). This error led the software to treat normal minor variations
of velocity as if they were serious, leading to incorrect compensation."

Remember to dot your i's and cross your t's, kids.