Los Angeles ? Human error triggered a cascade of events that caused the battery to fail last year on the Mars Global Surveyor, according to a preliminary report released Friday.

An internal NASA board determined that power loss likely doomed the spacecraft after a decade of meticulously mapping the Red Planet.

But the problems can be traced to September 2005 when a routine update to onboard computers caused inconsistencies in the spacecraft’s memory. Engineers trying to fix the problem sent incorrect software commands and then didn’t catch the mistakes because the procedures to do so were inadequate.

Scientists lost contact in November with the $154 million Global Surveyor. Launched in 1996, it was the oldest of six active probes on the Martian surface or circling the planet.