The document discusses the Mars Climate Orbiter mission that failed in 1999 due to a discrepancy in measurement units. It suggests that using JSR-385, the Java Specification Requests Units of Measurement API, could have prevented this failure by catching the unit mismatch. JSR-385 provides a standard library for working with quantities, units, and unit conversions that avoids issues with primitive types representing values with implicit units. The document promotes JSR-385 and its role in avoiding measurement errors through proper handling of units.