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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.
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 ).
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.
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.
Starting in May 1960, under Parks' direction, JPL/NASA conducted the world's first spacecraft mission to another planet, the Mariner 2 mission to Venus in 1962; the Ranger 7, 8 and 9 missions in 1964 and 1965, which produced the first close-up photos of the Moon; and the Mariner 4 mission to Mars in 1965.
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 ...
While the Soviet Union initially claimed the craft reached the surface intact, re-analysis, including atmospheric occultation data from the American Mariner 5 spacecraft that flew by Venus the day after its arrival, demonstrated that Venus's surface pressure was 75–100 atmospheres, much higher than Venera 4's 25 atm hull strength, and the ...