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A Brief History of Early Mars Probes
By Kenneth Silber
Staff Writer
posted: 12:04 pm ET
22 September 1999
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mars_history_990922The Mars Climate Orbiter, scheduled to arrive in orbit around Mars on Thursday, is the latest in a decades-long parade of probes aimed at the red planet. Attempts to send spacecraft to Mars date back to the early 1960s. Two Soviet flyby probes were launched in October 1960 but failed to reach Earth orbit. In 1962, three more Soviet probes failed -- two remaining in Earth orbit and one losing communication with Earth en route to Mars. In 1964, there were two more failures, one Soviet and one American; in the latter case, Mariner 3's solar panels failed to open. The first successful mission was the U.S. probe Mariner 4, which passed within 6,200 miles of Mars on July 14, 1965 and took close-up images of the red planet. The Mariner 6 and 7 probes returned images in 1969. In 1971, the Soviet Mars-2 mission became the first to orbit Mars, and the Soviet Mars-3 lander transmitted data from the planet's surface for 20 seconds. A wealth of new data and images emerged from the U.S. Viking 1 and 2 missions, which reached the planet in 1976. Each Viking consisted of a lander and an orbiter. Although the Vikings received considerable public and scientific attention, they also created some disappointment, when their instruments did not detect signs of past or present life. "With the space age, we learned very quickly that the planet was not as it had been described" by earlier astronomers and science-fiction writers, says Roger D. Launius, NASA's chief historian. In the 1890s, for instance, astronomer Percival Lowell detected what he believed were artificial "canals" on the surface of Mars, and in the first half of the 20th century novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about fantastic creatures and civilizations on Mars.
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