The Mariner Mission, 1962

A 34-page JPL booklet on the Mariner 2 mission to Venus, written entirely in the future tense of an in-flight cruise report rather than after the fact — Mariner 2 launched August 27, 1962 and would not reach Venus until mid-December, so this appears to have been issued during that roughly four-month cruise phase to explain the spacecraft and its objectives while the mission was still underway.

It opens with “The Planet Venus,” summarizing pre-flyby knowledge and the competing theories then current for the planet’s puzzling heat (a dense ionosphere, a greenhouse effect, or surface-level wind friction), then covers the July 1962 loss of Mariner 1 (destroyed by the Range Safety Officer 290 seconds after launch owing to a guidance deviation) and the fixes made before Mariner 2 flew an identical design.

A “Mariner 2 Spacecraft” section details its Atlas D–Agena B launch and parking-orbit injection, attitude control by cold-gas jets and Sun/Earth sensors, the September 4, 1962 midcourse correction burn, and the hydrazine motor’s ability to add as little as 7/10 foot per second of velocity. “Mariner 2 Scientific Instruments” lists the six onboard experiments — microwave and infrared radiometers, a magnetometer, charged-particle and cosmic-dust detectors, and a solar plasma spectrometer — run by investigators from nine institutions including Caltech, JPL, MIT, and UC Berkeley.

A closing “Subcontractors” section names the 34 firms that built Mariner 1 and 2 hardware under $6.5 million in JPL contracts, plus over 1,000 further industrial contributors totaling more than $3.5 million. Numerous JPL clean-room and test-stand photographs of the actual Mariner 2 spacecraft illustrate the text throughout.