{"id":916685,"date":"2026-11-14T03:36:15","date_gmt":"2026-11-14T03:36:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/916685\/"},"modified":"2026-11-14T03:36:15","modified_gmt":"2026-11-14T03:36:15","slug":"on-this-day-in-space-nov-13-1971-nasas-mariner-9-becomes-1st-spacecraft-to-orbit-mars-revealing-close-looks-at-the-martian-surface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/916685\/","title":{"rendered":"On this day in space! Nov. 13, 1971: NASA’s Mariner 9 becomes 1st spacecraft to orbit Mars, revealing close looks at the Martian surface"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mariner 9<\/a>. Those flybys showed that Mars had a cratered surface<\/a>, so some scientists thought that Mars looked just like the moon. Then Mariner 9 blew blew their minds.<\/p>\n

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When Mariner 9 got to Mars<\/a>, it arrived in the middle of a dust storm. It saw some tall structures sticking through the clouds. When the dust settled, images from Mariner 9 revealed that these structures were the tops of huge volcanoes.<\/p>\n

One volcano, Olympus Mons<\/a>, is the tallest in the solar system. Mariner 9 also spotted an enormous canyon called Valles Marineris<\/a>. This canyon is five times longer than the Grand Canyon in Arizona.<\/p>\n

Mariner 9 worked for one year in orbit. When it ran out of gas, NASA shut it off. But the spacecraft remains one of the most famous Mars voyagers of all time.<\/p>\n

You may like<\/p>\n

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The Mariner 9 spacecraft, seen here in a NASA model, was the first to orbit Mars in 1971. (Image credit: NASA)Here’s why it mattered<\/p>\n

Mariner 9 cemented its place in space history when it entered into orbit around Mars, the first human-built spacecraft ever to do so.<\/p>\n

The NASA spacecraft actually beat the Soviet Union’s own Mars 2 spacecraft to the Red Planet, even though Mars 2 “had an 11-day head start,” NASA said in a mission description<\/a>. (Mars 2 would go on to be the first human-built craft to impact the surface of Mars when it crashed into the Red Planet.)<\/p>\n

\"Space\"<\/p>\n

But it was the science from Mariner 9 that transformed Mars from a mysterious Red Planet into a full world for humans to explore.<\/p>\n

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The Mariner 9 mission first saw the peak of Olympus Mons on Mars in the midst of a global dust storm in 1971. (Image credit: NASA\/JPL)<\/p>\n

Mariner 9 carried four primary instruments to study Mars, including a camera system for imaging, an ultraviolet spectrometer, an infrared spectrometer and an infrared radiometer. The probe mapped 85% of Mars with those tools during its nearly one-year mission.<\/p>\n

The Mariner 9 spacecraft discovered 20 giant volcanoes on Mars<\/a> (including Olympus Mars) and made key observations to map Valles Marineris, which runs 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) long acros the Tharsis region<\/a> and is 120 miles (200 km) wide.<\/p>\n

What to read next<\/p>\n

“The canyon was named in honor of Mariner 9,” NASA said in an overview<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In all, Mariner 9 took 7,329 photos of the surface of Mars, mapping the planet down to a resolution of between 1\/2-1 mile (1-2 km). It also snapped at least 80 photos of Phobos and Deimos, the two small moons of Mars.<\/p>\n

By February 1972, Mariner 9’s supply of gaseous nitrogen, which it used to feed its attitide control thrusters, had run dry. NASA finally shut down the mission in October 1972.<\/p>\n

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space Story archive<\/a> and watch our On This Day In Space videos on YouTube<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"This<\/p>\n

\nOn this day in space! Nov. 12, 2014: European Philae probe lands on Comet 67P<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter On Nov. 13,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":916686,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[79,193],"class_list":["post-916685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=916685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916685\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/916686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=916685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=916685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=916685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}