Mission Atlas
← Mission directory

Mission record

Mariner 1

Also known as Mariner1

NASA-Office of Space Science Applications · Launched

Explore trajectory

Failed · Failure

The first Mariner mission, intended to perform a Venus flyby, and destroyed by the Range Safety Officer 293 seconds after launch when it veered off course. NSSDCA attributes the failure to a combination of two factors: improper operation of the Atlas airborne beacon equipment, which lost the rate signal from the vehicle for prolonged periods, and the omission of a superscript overbar when the handwritten guidance equations were translated into coded computer instructions, which allowed incorrect guidance signals to be transmitted while the beacon was inoperative.

Destinations
Launch vehicle
Atlas-Agena B
Launch site
Cape Canaveral, United States
Countries
United States
Mission types
Flyby

Chronology

Mission timeline

  1. Launch

    Launched from Cape Canaveral on an Atlas-Agena B

    NASA SP-59, printed page 87, identifies the July 22, 1962 launch at 04:21:23 Eastern Standard Time, equivalent to 09:21:23 on the shared UTC calendar.

    Earth

  2. Mission end

    Destroyed by the Range Safety Officer 293 seconds after launch

    The original NASA SP-59 launch-and-abort account explicitly places the flight on July 22, 1962 and reports destruct at 04:26:16 Eastern Standard Time, 293 seconds after liftoff and six seconds before planned Atlas-Agena separation. The transponder continued for another 64 seconds. A later NASA summary gives 294.5 seconds; the original project account supplies this chronology.

    Earth

Mission architecture

Vehicles

  • Mariner 1 · Spacecraft

    Destinations: Venus

Trajectory record

Trajectory dataset not yet available

Known dates and encounters do not uniquely determine a flight path. This mission’s sourced timeline is available above; no verified trajectory is currently published here.

What is needed to reconstruct this path?
  • A frame-qualified position and vector velocity at an epoch, or equivalent complete orbital elements.
  • The actual failed-flight state history. Intended destinations are not evidence that the spacecraft reached them.

Provenance

Sources

Each source is listed once and labeled with the mission, event, trajectory, or destination/body context it supports.

Data verified through September 14, 2026