In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t all that long ago that the entire body of knowledge of our solar system was built solely with Earth-based observations. Turning first their naked eyes to the heavens, and then a succession of increasingly complex and sensitive optical and radio telescopes gathering light from all across the spectrum, our astronomically curious forbears did a commendable job working out the broad strokes of what’s going on in the neighborhood.
But there’s only so much information that can be gathered by instruments operating at the bottom of a roiling ocean of air, so when the opportunity to send instruments to our planetary neighbors began to be possible some 60 years ago, scientists started planning how to accomplish it. What resulted was the Mariner program, a series of interplanetary probes launched between 1962 and 1973 that performed flyby missions of the inner planets.
The list of accomplishments of the Mariner program is long indeed, and the number of firsts achieved by its ten spacecraft is impressive. But it is Mariner 4, the first flyby mission of Mars, which set the stage for a lot of the science being done on and around Mars today, and the first mission where NASA wisely took a “pics or it didn’t happen” approach to planetary science. It was the first time a TV camera had traveled to another world, and it was anything but a sure bet that it would pay dividends.
First Steps to the Stars
Given that we were still climbing the earliest and steepest part of the spaceflight learning curve in the late 1950s, it was pretty audacious to start thinking about reaching out to our neighboring planets. But by the change of the decade, the broad outlines of what would come to be known as the Mariner program were already worked out. They were designed as limited-scope missions — as opposed to the “Grand Tour” missions that were soon to come — of the inner planets.
While each of the ten Mariner missions had specific scientific goals in mind, and each spacecraft was custom built for the purpose, there was an overarching theme: learn how to explore outer space. At the time of Mariner’s conception, Russia and the United States had flown precious few missions, most of which were either suborbital or into low Earth orbit. Given the exigencies of the Cold War, a lot of those missions were devoted to one-upmanship and proving that one nation or the other had captured the high ground, and with relatively short-shrift paid to planetary science, very little was known about how to get to outer space and how to operate there.
Mariner was also designed to take advantage of the new Atlas rockets, the first intercontinental ballistic missile in the US fleet. When paired with the Agena second stage, the stack was capable of lifting larger payloads and achieving Earth escape velocity. The Atlas-Agena combination would launch the first five Mariner probes, with more successes than failures — Mariner 1 and Mariner 3 were both lost due to guidance issues and payload fairing damage respectively.
All the Mariner spacecraft were designed around a more-or-less common bus, either hexagonal or octagonal, which was designed to maximize the use of space inside the Agena payload fairing. The probes were all solar-powered, with the number of panels depending on which way they were going — two if heading sunward to Venus or Mercury, or four for the Mars-bound missions, to soak up more of the weaker sunlight. The solar panels were built from extremely light aluminum panels, corrugated for rigidity, and each was adorned with 7,056 fantastically expensive solar cells. The four panels on Mariner 4 were stored folded under spring pressure; they were deployed once in orbit with pyrotechnic squibs that pulled out a retaining pin.
And a Star to Steer Her By
The Mariner probes were also the first spacecraft designed to take advantage of communications infrastructure offered by the growing Deep Space Network, with large dish antennas that could be pointed toward Earth. This raised the problem of accurate attitude control — constant contact with the DSN would require precision positioning in space to a degree that had yet to be achieved.
Prior to the Mariner program, navigation and attitude control of spacecraft was a relatively simple task. Keeping an Earth-orbiting spacecraft pointed in the right direction involved little more than detecting the biggest, brightest thing in the sky — the Earth itself. There were subtleties, of course, but they were nothing compared to the challenges of interplanetary travel, especially since the task had yet to be tried.
The Mariner spacecraft would all require a two-position fix in space to maintain the correct attitude. The sun was an easy target, especially since keeping the solar panels more or less oblique to the sun was critical to maximize power production. Sun sensors on the sun-facing upper deck of Mariner provided inputs to the central computer and sequencer (CC&S), the controller for the entire spacecraft, that activated nitrogen jets located around the spacecraft to control its pitch and yaw.
Mariner’s second fix, which would control the roll axis passing through the waveguide of the dish antenna, was based on the star Canopus. Located in the southern constellation of Carina, Canopus is the second-brightest star in the night sky after Sirius. It has been an aid to navigation since antiquity, and its characteristic brightness, as well as its position well below the plane of the ecliptic, make it perfect for interplanetary navigation.
Mariner 3 and 4 were the first spacecraft to include Canopus star trackers. The task of picking one particular star out among a field of thousands isn’t trivial. The Canopus tracker consisted of an optical telescope with light baffles to keep stray light from the detection electronics, which consisted of a special vacuum tube called the image dissector. This was essentially a scanning photomultiplier tube that could look at a small slice of space as the spacecraft slowly performed a search maneuver around its roll axis. The light from any star coming into view produced a signal proportional to both its intensity and its location, as determined by where in the image dissector’s scanning field it was spotted. When a star matching the intensity of Canopus was found, the tracker sent a roll-error signal to the reaction control jets, which then kept Canopus locked in view.
The Canopus star tracker took a bit of time to get working properly on Mariner 4. While it was able to lock onto Canopus, intermittent bright signals would appear unexpected in its field of view, causing the tracker to lose lock on Canopus and start another cycle of “star hopping”. Flight controllers puzzled over this for a while until determining that a cloud of dust particles and paint flecks whizzing along through space with Mariner 4 was the likely culprit — even something tiny that close to the tracker could appear to be as bright or brighter than Canopus. The problem was fixed by turning off a CC&S routine used to protect the star tracker from Earth-shine, as Mariner was by then far enough away from home that the star tracker could ignore it.
Mars TV
While all these instruments were important, Mariner’s designers recognized that stimulating the public interest was an important soft goal of the mission, and in the early 1960s, there was no better way to win the public’s hearts and minds than television. And so well in advance of the mission, a special television camera was designed to take pictures of Mars as Mariner sped past.
The design of the camera, which centered around a special vidicon tube, was outlined in a film hosted by “Mr. Wizard” himself, Don Herbert — a move further calculated to capitalize on the power of television.
The original plan for Mariner’s camera was to keep it covered until just before the Mars flyby started. But with the experience of the dust cloud interfering with the Canopus tracker, controllers decided to jettison the camera’s lens cap early, to give any debris a chance to disperse. The camera worked flawlessly, capturing 22 narrow-angle photos of the surface from about 10 9,800 km altitude. The pictures revealed well-defined and numerous craters, putting to rest any remaining hope that Mars still had a thick atmosphere and liquid water.
While Mariner 4’s up-close look at Mars was disappointing to some, especially those who still harbored visions of lush vegetation crisscrossed with ancient canals, it was proof that Mars was a far more foreign and interesting place than our home planet. And Mariner 4 had proved that not only could the interplanetary space be navigated safely, but that it was possible to send instruments there and do useful science, even across the yawning gulf of space. In a very real way, the Mariner probes set the standard for planetary science, and paved the way for us to reach out to Mars and beyond.
[Main image: Mariner 4 Image of Mars via NASA]
[Thanks to Noel for the idea to dive into this topic.]
Another article about Mars (seen from USA) and still nothing about the Chinese rover Zhurong successful Mars landing ?
Back in the day, it was the same way about the Russian space program. There was almost no news coverage of their Venus landers or their Moon rovers. The US really downplayed their space exploration efforts.
You can’t tell what you don’t know. The USSR simply did not share any live info or even weeks old info. They did not say when they were going to launch. They did not announce when a re-entry was going to happen until after a recovery of crew. Likewise, the Chinese have released next to nothing from the probe except video to show their parachute and powered landing worked like the American one.
Besides, just what do you expect to hear about Mars? There are reddish brown rocks over here? And over there? And look more over there! And craters. Lots of craters. My impression is that colonists better be big city apartment dwellers who rarely if ever go outside and don’t mind a changeless view of inanimate minerals. Very much like living in an Antarctic open pit mine.
“Yeah! We were able to do what you’ve done, using technology stolen from you!”
This is what Italian chefs and gun owners should be saying to the Chinese
And Americans getting to the moon were not using technology stolen from the Nazis? Stealin’n’killin’ is what this species does best.
Technology stolen? We imported the inventors of the technology (some of them…the Russians got the rest), who were, to quote Tom Lehrer, “apolitical”…tell that to the Londoners!
Technology is not “owned” by one nation. If it was, the US has stolen rocket tech from the Germans and jet engines from the British.
Who had fighters with jet engines? Would you want to use a British centrifugal pump style engine?
It wasn’t theft, it was an “homage”!
There was a mention of it on Hackaday (https://hackaday.com/2021/05/16/hackaday-links-may-16-2021/) but with only a couple of photos released by China and little else, what’s there to report?
Articles on Chinese space missions are kind of hard, because they reveal exactly nothing about the engineering behind them. Since I like to write about how things work, or worked, and NASA makes pretty much everything public — although you have to dig for it sometimes — these articles are a lot more satisfying to write.
Great article, Dan! I’m typically more a fan of the “hacks”, but this was very informative and well written.
Nice article and linked video. Mariner 4 = legend.
Small error: “capturing 22 narrow-angle photos of the surface from about 10 km altitude”
I thought the 10 km altitude was suspicious.
Is that what you were referring to?
Yep.
that would be a hell of a flyby.
maybe more like 10,000 km
My bad — fixed it in the text. Thanks for picking that up.
I remember how disappointed I was back then when we learned that Mars was a barren world. Until the Mariner missions we nothing about what Mars was like. Now we know what a terrible place it is, I don’t understand why anyone would to go there and live out the rest of their life.
In Futurama the Martians tell Fry ” it’s a dump… that’s why we left..”.
I certainly would if i was a young man with the right skills. It’s the new frontier. And it’s about time we leave the cradle; putting all eggs in one basket is not a long-term survival strategy.
Trashing the craddle before even mastering how to leave it is even more short-termist strategy.
How long do you expect to live? Serious question: Why do you care about the survival of the species?
I think it’s because creating, healing something is more satisfying than destroying it. Mars is a dead world. Bringing it back to life again, might be a noble act that could be an inspiration for generations to come. If they realize that it’s possible, they might also believe that saving good old earth is feasible.
Ha. Lets try the Sahara first then. Of course it is way easier as there is an athmosphere. If that works, than surely we can do a whole planet.
At least I’m not the only one thinking this. I follow Musk’s whole Starship/Mars adventure very closely but have a hard time imagining the millions of people whoo will want to spend the rest of their life indoors on a planet that is way worse than a cross between Antarctica and the Sahara. Terraforming? The time to develop the technology and execute the actual process is measured in centuries, if not millenia. No one alive today will have any hope that even his grandchild will see a plant grow outdoors on Mars.
“it was proof that Mars was a far more foreign and interesting place than our home planet” I’m just astounded that someone can really think such a thing of a planet that is basically a freezing cold dead rock. Has the author really become so blind as to varied and beatiful and interesting our home base is?
The main attraction of Mars is that in this day and age it still is an absolute wild idea to be walking on the surface of another planet. As soon as a few ships have gone and returned, it quickly becomes the new normal and everyone will think: “Nice, but wth am I going to do there?”
One thing I don’t understand though. Why use Sun and Canopus, instead of Sun and Earth as orientation points when few million km+ away from Earth?
When trying to capture the hearts of the public,
why even use a star named “Can o’ Pus”? (ewww!)
B^)
Maybe?
(SWAG alert!) the Earth is moving too fast relative to a distant star?
i can only speculate but the article said canopus is useful specifically because it’s outside the plane of the ecliptic. i think that’s important to avoid it being confused for planets. i’m not sure how sophisticated their heuristics, optics, and photosensors were but i suspect that differentiating earth and venus would be a challenge. and definitely, as you head away from the sun, earth and sun can get so close together that getting a clear signal from earth would be a challenge — your primitive photosensor would be pegged at full-scale high from the light leaking in from the sun, it wouldn’t be able to discern earth at all. also, earth would change significantly as your distance from it changed, while canopus would be a similar brightness level throughout the mission.
the amazing thing to me is that it worked at all. it was (apparently) astoundingly primitive.
Good points, good points. Earth and Sun appearing close by from far away, and other issues that you mentioned. Thanks.
it’s also very bright — second to Sirius in the night sky
the star tracker did indeed capture several other things before they eventually got it to lock onto Canopus. and to wit had further struggles keeping it there.
Using Pulsars would be better since each one has a unique rotational time.
But, was that known at the time?
They actually addressed that in one of the papers I read. The main reason was that Earth would be too close to the Sun when Mariner 4 reached Mars, so the angle between them would be too narrow for accurate positioning. They actually did use Earth as a second reference point for Mariner 2, which went to Venus. The geometry was more favorable for that mission since they were going sunward.
Thank you.
The Sun and Canopus can be considered fixed points for navigation. Earth not so much.
From the photo of the pinpuller, it looks (to me) like the “pin” is on the left side of the photo, based on the relative position of the gas port between the squib and the piston.
Yes, that was my understanding too. The squibs vent their gasses into the cylinder and force the piston backwards, withdrawing the pin from whatever it’s inserted into. I believe a switch gets screwed in opposite the pin for confirmation of actuation.
Would this make it amongst the first ever digital cameras?
No. A vidicon is an analog pickup device.
Well, so are CCDs and CMOS active-pixel sensors — there’s ADCs in there that convert each pixel’s analog levels to binary. Even on Mariner 4, the analog vidicon data was digitized _before_ being stored on the magnetic tape loop that later fed the radio. Earthside reproduction of the images was done by a digital-to-analog film recorder, which if I’m remembering things right was basically a slow camera pointed at an oscilloscope screen (I’m pretty sure the video’s chalked-in wall painting was just a bit of fun until the real photos were ready), but everything was processed digitally.
“The Voyage of Mariner II” Scientific American Magazine July 1963 – This is a very interesting article written about the Mariner probe that went to Venus before Mariner IV”.
I’ve always liked Mariner 9, because it used Forward Error Correcting codes (Augmented Hadamard code [32, 6, 16]) to the send data 135 million kilometres (84 million miles ; 451 light seconds ; ~8 light minutes) back to earth, using a 20 watt transmitter!
There was even an UK Open University lecture talking about the coding that was:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV24AYKot-s
I would like to know what’s inside the face or the pyramid… So….. Get yer azzz to Maaaaszz….
“…cloud of dust particles and paint flecks whizzing along through space …”
Paint flecks in space? Whizzing by? How?
Note it’s not “by”, it’s “along” — these are particles the craft brought with it. The flecks of paint were (presumably) knocked loose during launch, and once Mariner was in space, it was the most massive local body, so they and whatever else were around went along for the ride.
Ah that makes sense.
I guess Einstein would say, “standing along” instead of “whizzing along”.
I find it amusing that the NASA document cites measurements in centimeters (inches) when you can immediately tell the design process was 100% in US customary units. Looks a bit pretentious to me.
Not really. They immediately learned from many mistakes with unit mixing. Besides, Germans were very influential in US space program then.
Mariner flew by Mars in 1965