Mars 1 & Mariner 4

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The first step in going to a new planet is learning about it. We have always known that we would someday be traveling to Mars, and so we have been sending probes there for almost half a century. Although the first probe, the Soviet Mars 1, sent back no usable data, it did show that sending probes to Mars was possible.

The Soviet probe Mars 1 did not provide any useful data because its only instrument was a single camera, and that camera's resolution didn't capture any better of an image than ground based telescopes did. However, Mars 1 was followed by the U.S. probe Mariner 4. Mariner 4 was launched November 28, 1964, and its objective was to study the plasma and magnetic fields around Mars. When it arrived in July 1965, its instruments detected that Mars had a magnetic field, or magnetoshpere, less than three thousand times less powerful than Earth's. It also found that Mars had a surface pressure of only 5 mbar(Earth's atmosphere is 1013 mbar). Again, just like Mars 1, the images it sent back were of so low quality that they were useless.

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