Launch of Mariner 2

Mariner 2 was a NASA space probe, launched towards Venus from Cape Canaveral, and it became the first spacecraft to make a successful flyby of another planet. After the failure of Mariner 1 a few weeks earlier, it made it to Venus in December and passed within about 35,000 kilometres of the planet, scanning it with its instruments. Mariner 2 showed that Venus has a very hot surface and a thick atmosphere, and that it has no detectable magnetic field. It also measured the solar wind, a continuous flow of charged particles from the Sun, on its way, and it confirmed earlier suspicions about it. The success was an important early achievement of American space exploration.

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