It's amusing how that Mars article used this sentence:
" The peer review preliminary findings indicate that one team used English units (e.g., inches, feet and pounds) while the other used metric units for a key spacecraft operation. "
The word "English", capitalized, implies British units, but the UK is mostly metric like the rest of the world. The words "English units" should be replaced with "imperial units" to be more factual. I will admit, many countries still use a mix of imperial units and metric units, but most of the world is metric now (SI units). Metric is predominant in science as well, so who ever used imperial in that project was the main cause of the failure. I'm sure the investigation, lead by NASA/JPL, will be like letting the fox investigate who got into the hen house, they will blame the hens...