Mariner 1

What was Mariner 1?

Mariner 1 was the first U.S. attempt to launch a spacecraft to explore Venus up close. It was intended to perform a Venus flyby. The spacecraft was lost to a software glitch. Investigators found a typo had caused a fault in the launch vehicle's guidance software. The spacecraft and booster were destroyed shortly after launch for safety.

Results

Mariner 1 was the first of two spacecraft NASA designed to send to Venus. Each carried a modest suite (about 20 pounds or 9 kilograms) of scientific instrumentation but had no imaging capability.

The spacecraft included 54,000 components and were designed to maintain contact with Earth for about 15 weeks.

Mariner 1 lifted off on July 22, 1962, but its rocket veered off course and the Range Safety Officer had to send a destruct command to the vehicle at T+294.5 seconds.

The failure was traced to a guidance antenna on the Atlas. Also, a software error, the omission of an overbar for the symbol R for radius (R instead of R̅) in an equation, caused the program to not respond as planned. It should be noted the omission was not a hyphen, as is sometimes erroneously reported.

Engineers quickly fixed the problems and sent Mariner 2 on its way to Venus on Aug. 27, 1962. It completed the first remote encounter with another planet on Dec. 14, 1962, returning valuable information about our celestial neighbor.