Mars-probe failure 'human error'

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The US space agency, Nasa, has said that human error was to blame for the failure of the $154m (£77.5m) Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. Engineers lost contact with the probe in early November and later admitted it was lost and irrecoverable. Nasa said that faulty changes made to the spacecraft's computer memory caused the battery to overheat. The 10-year-old craft had sent thousands of images of Mars back to Earth, suggesting water once flowed. "The loss of the spacecraft was the result of a series of events linked to a computer error made five months before the likely battery failure," said Dolly Perkins, of Nasa.