The Brief

Sixty years ago today, NASA’s Mariner 4 flew within about 6,000 miles of Mars, capturing the first close-up images of another planet’s surface.

The much awaited images were in black and white, converted from analog radio signals, and showed the Martian landscape pockmarked with craters.

Mariner 4 Mission

The Mariner 4 crater is nearly 94 miles in diameter. Running from the lower left corner of the frame through the bottom of the crater is a linear ridge which is part of Sirenum Fossae.

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NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Composite shaded albedo map of the Elysium Planitia region on Mars.

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An image of the western border of Amazonis Planitia. A few craters can be discerned, but the shading is subdued due to the high sun angle.

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An image of the southern highlands, south of Sirenum Fossae taken during southern mid winter. The white rims of the craters may be due to frost or clouds, but the contrast is poor. The rim at upper left may be the edge of the crater Newton.

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A "real-time data translator" machine converted a Mariner 4 digital image data into numbers printed on strips of paper. Employees from the Telecommunications Section at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, attached these strips side by side to a display panel and hand colored the numbers like a paint-by-numbers picture.

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NASA/JPL-Caltech

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NASA’s Mariner 4 spacecraft lifts off Launch Pad 12 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station atop an Atlas Agena rocket on Nov. 28, 1964.

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NASA

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Mariner 4 on a test fixture in a clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. It's being prepared for a weight test before launch to Mars.

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The Mariner 4 spacecraft being prepared for a weight test at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena on November 1, 1963.

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Dr. William H. Pickering (left), director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, presents Mariner 4 spacecraft photos to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965.

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NASA

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“You had the idea that there may have been a civilization on Mars, but Mars was a dying planet. And before Mariner 4 people didn’t really know if there were canals on Mars or not,” said Hoppy Price, chief engineer for NASA's robotic Mars Exploration Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a video posted by the organization.

Other equipment on the space probe measured the daytime surface temperature, estimated the surface pressure to be about 200 times less than on Earth, and helped us figure out that Mars’ atmosphere is made up of significant amounts of carbon dioxide.

“The Mariner 4 experiment has been a brilliant success, tantalizing us with the possibilities for Martian exploration that are now within our grasp,” wrote astronomer Carl Sagan in the July 1966 edition of Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

“The scientific exploration of Mars — whether or not we uncover life on that planet — remains one of the greatest opportunities in the history of science,” Sagan wrote.

The spacecraft was developed and built by JPL in Pasadena over the course of two years, and became the U.S. space program’s second successful mission to another planet. The first was Mariner 2, which flew to Venus in December 1962.

Mariner 4 weighed just 575 pounds, launching from Earth in late 1964 and arriving at Mars in about eight months.

Mariner 4’s mission ended in December 1967 when it ran out of propellant.

The exploration of Mars has continued. The latest mission is the Perseverance rover, which is collecting rock samples that could carry evidence of prehistoric, microscopic life.

The idea is to test the samples, but they first need to be brought back to Earth as part of the complex Mars Sample Return mission.

“That would be the next mission that we would hope to do,” Price said in an interview. Funding for that part of the mission is currently uncertain.