This seems unlikely for a European/French system. Are you perhaps confusing this story with the NASA Mars Observer mission, mentioned elsewhere in the thread, w

This seems unlikely for a European/French system. Are you perhaps confusing this story with the NASA Mars Observer mission, mentioned elsewhere in the thread, which failed because of a metric vs imperial error? The value was horizontal velocity. I imagine in metric it would be expressed in m/s while in imperial it's going to be feet per second (mph seems highly improbable).