Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Mariner 10 was an American robotic space probe launched by NASA on 3 November 1973, to fly by the planets Mercury and Venus. It was the first spacecraft to perform flybys of multiple planets. [3] Mariner 10 was launched approximately two years after Mariner 9 and was the last spacecraft in the Mariner program.
Mariner 10. The Mariner 10 spacecraft launched on November 3, 1973, and was the first to use a gravity assist trajectory, accelerating as it entered the gravitational influence of Venus, then being flung by the planet's gravity onto a slightly different course to reach Mercury. [1]
The exploration of Mercury has a minor role in the space interests of the world. It is the least explored inner planet. [1] As of 2015, the Mariner 10 and MESSENGER missions have been the only missions that have made close observations of Mercury.
The mapping carried out with the images obtained by the Mariner 10 flybys in 1974 and 1975 led to nine of the quadrangles being renamed for newly mapped prominent features. [1] The remaining six quadrangles were completely unmapped by Mariner 10 and were still referred to by their albedo feature names.
The spacecraft is named for the late Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo, a 20th-century Italian mathematician who contributed to NASA's Mariner 10 mission to Mercury in the 1970s and, two decades later, to ...
The data revealed that the planet's magnetic field is much like Earth's, which deflects the solar wind around the planet. For many years after the Mariner 10 encounters, the origin of Mercury's magnetic field remained the subject of several competing theories. [197] [198]
Mercury's magnetic field is approximately a magnetic dipole, apparently global, [8] on the planet of Mercury. [9] Data from Mariner 10 led to its discovery in 1974; the spacecraft measured the field's strength as 1.1% that of Earth's magnetic field. [10] The origin of the magnetic field can be explained by dynamo theory. [11]
In 1973, Mariner 10 was launched by NASA to make multiple flyby encounters of Venus and Mercury. Mariner 10 provided the first detailed data of Mercury, mapping 40–45% of the surface. [24] Mariner 10's final flyby of Mercury occurred on March 16, 1975. No subsequent close-range observations of the planet would take place for more than 30 years.