Filed under
flyby
4 milestones, in chronological order.
- 15 July 1965First Contact
Mariner 4 photographs a cratered, near-airless Mars
Twenty-one grainy frames replaced the canals with craters, and a radio occultation put the surface pressure near one percent of Earth's.
- 31 July and 5 August 1969First Contact
Mariner 6 and 7 find more craters
Two flybys returned 201 pictures and pinned the atmosphere at 6 to 7 millibars, but both happened to cross the oldest, dullest terrain on Mars.
- 14 December 2003The Rover Decades
Nozomi takes five years to reach Mars, then flies past
Japan's first interplanetary probe lost the fuel to stop at Mars to a malfunctioning valve in 1998. ISAS flew it five more years anyway, then watched it coast past at 1,000 km.
- 26 November 2018Follow the Water
Two CubeSats fly to Mars and call the landing live
MarCO-A and MarCO-B, 13.5 kilograms each, were the first CubeSats ever to leave Earth orbit — and they carried InSight's descent telemetry home live at 8 kilobits per second.