Mariner 2

Mariner 2 was the second in the series of Mariner Missions by NASA to explore interplanetary space. It was launched on August 27, 1962 and performed a flyby of Venus on December 14, 1962. Along with gathering information about the solar wind and cosmic rays, it also gathered data about Venus, and was the first spacecraft to explore another planet (albeit only with a flyby). Although earth-based measurements had established that Venus was very hot, the Mariner mission was the first time that we had confirmation that Venus was too hot for any terrestrial-type life to live on.

There are also three things that struck me about this mission:

• How fast we got into space. The United States first orbited a satellite in January of 1958, several months after Sputnik. It took less than five years to go from the first satellite to building and launching a craft able to go to another planet.
• But we weren't always successful. Despite justifiable pride in this era of scientific exploration, it is easy to forget how many failures there were. Of the first four Mariner missions, from 1962 to 1964, Mariner 2, and Mariner 4 to Mars were successful, while Mariner 1 and Mariner 3 both failed to launch. The Space Race led to great scientific growth, but it was not an automatic success.
• Finally, Mariner 2 (along with later missions to Mars) put away ideas and dreams that other planets of the Solar System were inhabitable. Before the early 1960s, there was still some conceptions of Venus as perhaps being a swampy world full of dinosaurs. Many of these were more popular fantasies, but they still had some scientific possibility. So Mariner 2 marked the era when the solar system went from being a source of fantasy, to being a place that could actually be explored.