The Great Kersten Blunder Blunder

I received an email recently from BA reader Derek Armentrout, asking about a story he heard. This anecdote, called "The Great Kersten Blunder", alleges that a programmer named Kersten made a metric to Imperial unit conversion error that doomed Vigor, a space probe to Venus. Was this legit? I hadn't heard this one, so I looked it up. What I found was interesting: If you search on "Kersten blunder" or "Vigor Venus probe" you get the same story, repeated over and again with at most minor changes. H...