The Soviets launched the Sputnik 1, the first Earth orbiting satellite, on October 4, 1957. With the advent of the Cold War, the two then- superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, both initiated ambitious space programs with the intent of demonstrating military, technological, and political dominance. Mariner II trajectory projected on the ecliptic plane. The errors were traced to a mistake in a specification of the hand-written guidance equations which were then subsequently codified in the computer program. Shortly after liftoff, errors in communication between the rocket and its ground-based guidance systems caused the rocket to veer off course, and it had to be destroyed by range safety. Mariner 1 was launched by an Atlas-Agena rocket from Cape Canaveral's Pad 12 on July 22, 1962. Mariner 1 carried a suite of experiments to determine the temperature of Venus as well to measure magnetic fields and charged particles near the planet and in interplanetary space. Mariner 1 (and its sibling spacecraft, Mariner 2), were then adapted from the lighter Ranger lunar spacecraft. Developed by Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and originally planned to be a purpose-built probe launched summer 1962, Mariner 1's design was changed when the Centaur proved unavailable at that early date. Mariner 1, built to conduct the first American planetary flyby of Venus, was the first spacecraft of NASA's interplanetary Mariner program.
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