Mariner Missions

The Mariner program consisted of ten exploration probes launched between 1962 and 1973. The spacecraft were designed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to investigate the planets Mars, Venus, and Mercury.

All Mariner missions were launched on Atlas rockets, with early missions using Atlas-Agena, and later missions using Atlas-Centaur. Because of reliability issues with available launchers, the missions tended to use pairs of spacecraft launched on separate rockets. Ultimately three Mariner missions failed due to launch vehicle or payload shroud failures. In each case, the duplicate spacecraft was able to complete the mission.

Mariner spacecraft accomplished a number of important firsts, including the first mission to visit Venus (Mariner 2), the first successful Mars encounter (Mariner 4), and the first mission to visit Mercury (Mariner 10).

More information may be found at https://historicspacecraft.com/Probes_Mariner.html.  

The Geosciences Node maintains the following data sets from the Mariner missions.

Mariner Mars 1969 Images (PDS4)