Mariner 4 Reaches Mars
Next: July 14, 2027
Our first close look at Mars.
The story
Where it comes from
This Story marks the anniversary of 14 July 1965, when NASA's Mariner 4 became the first spacecraft to fly past Mars. Launched on 28 November 1964, it travelled for 228 days and passed about 9,846 kilometres above the planet on the evening of 14 July, US time. Its camera took 21 complete pictures and part of a 22nd, the first close-up images of another planet. Instead of the signs of life people had imagined for centuries, they showed a dry, heavily cratered surface, and they opened the age of Mars exploration.
How it's celebrated
There is no formal observance. NASA keeps the Mariner 4 pictures online, including a famous hand-coloured version of the first one, and every Mars orbiter, lander and rover since has followed the path it opened. It is a good day to set those grainy first frames beside a modern rover photograph and see how far one flyby has taken us.
Did you know
- Too eager to wait for computers, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory stapled strips of printed numbers to a wall and coloured them in with pastels from an art shop, making the first picture of Mars by hand.
- Each image took more than eight hours to come down and process, and together the pictures covered only about 1 per cent of the planet.
- On 24 September 2014 India's Mars Orbiter Mission entered orbit around Mars, making India the first country to succeed on its first attempt.
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