50 Years After First Interplanetary Probe, NASA Looks To Future
Originally published on Mon December 17, 2012 9:27 am Fifty
years ago, on Dec. 14, 1962, reporters gathered for a press
briefing at NASA headquarters and heard an unearthly sound:
radio signals being beamed back by a spacecraft flying within
22,000 miles of Venus. The Mariner 2 mission to Venus was the
first time any spacecraft had ever gone to another planet. These
days, vivid photographs showing scenes from all around the solar
system are so ubiquitous that people might easily forget how
mysterious our planetary neighbors used to be. "The planets were
all known to exist by the Mariner 2 mission in 1962, but very
little was known about them, and much of what was believed to be
true about them turned out to be wrong," says Erik Conway, a
historian at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which built the
Mariner 2 spacecraft. Scientists back then could only study the
planets through telescopes. And Venus, seen through a telescope,
was entirely shroude