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Mariner 2 (Mariner-Venus 1962), an American space probe to Venus, was the first robotic space probe to report successfully from a planetary encounter. The first successful spacecraft in the NASA Mariner program , it was a simplified version of the Block I spacecraft of the Ranger program and an exact copy of Mariner 1 .
Mariner 2 (designated Mariner R-2) was launched on August 27, 1962, sending it on a 3½-month flight to Venus. The mission was a success, and Mariner 2 became the first spacecraft to have flown by another planet. On the way it measured for the first time the solar wind, a constant stream of charged particles flowing outward from the Sun.
Global topographic map of Venus, with all probe landings marked (red: returned images; with additional black dot: analyzed samples). There have been 46 space missions to the planet Venus (including gravity-assist flybys). Missions to Venus constitute part of the exploration of Venus.
The first successful flyby Venus probe was the American Mariner 2 spacecraft, which flew past Venus in 1962, coming within 35,000 km. A modified Ranger Moon probe, it established that Venus has practically no intrinsic magnetic field and measured the temperature of the planet's atmosphere to be approximately 500 °C (773 K ; 932 °F ).
When Mariner 4 flew by Mars on July 15, 1965, it captured the first images of another planet from space. But the first image of Mars ever seen on TV was different than expected.
Contact with Venera 1 was lost 7 days after launch. It was the first spacecraft to fly by Venus, or indeed any planet. [78] Mariner 2: Venus 27 August 1962 14 December 1962 110 days (3 months, 18 days) Mariner 2 flew by Venus at a minimum distance of 34,773 km. It was the first spacecraft to return data from Venus. [79] Mars 1: Mars 1 November 1962
The spacecraft is named for the late Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo, a 20th-century Italian mathematician who contributed to NASA's Mariner 10 mission to Mercury in the 1970s and, two decades later, to ...
However, as the spacecraft's data probes had failed upon atmospheric penetration, no data from within the Venusian atmosphere were retrieved from the mission. On 18 October 1967, Venera 4 became the first spacecraft to measure the atmosphere of another planet. This spacecraft first showed the major gas of Venus's atmosphere to be CO 2. [5]