Re:Do we care? (Score 1)

Absolutely not!!! NASA uses it to slam probes into Mars.

If you BOTHER TO READ the report of the navigation failure of the Mars climate orbiter, you'll see that it had several causes unrelated to the fact that the software is written in Fortran.

1. Lockheed and Martin, now one, have done business with JPL for decades. They well know that everything is metric. Inexplicably, when the spacecraft did attitude maneuvers (which because of imbalances can change the trajectory) they reported the results of their "small forces" model in pound seconds, not Newton seconds, so they were off by a factor of 4.4.

2. A member of the navigation operations team, which was overworked, understaffed and undertrained, noticed an anomaly in the trajectory several weeks before encounter. He didn't have the expertise to understand what it was (read the part about "undertrained" above), his boss told him "you don't have time to worry about that" (read the part about "overworked understaffed" above), and because the JPL senior management has been hard at work for a decade demolishing the institutional infrastructure of experts, there was nobody he could return to.

3. When it became obvious, even to managers, that there was something wrong with the trajectory, a "tiger team" meeting was called, with engineering, propulsion, operations, software, managers, etc. After much discussion, it was decided to do a fifth trajectory correction maneuver, since by that time the uncertainty in the spacecraft position exceeded 60 kilometers. After the meeting, the managers went back to their castle and decided not to do it.