There was an understated elegance to the Mariner Mission project, which was a set of ten JPL/NASA spacecraft-probes beginning in 1962 and ending in the 1970s. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, aimed to be a national space laboratory, focusing on planetary exploration at the beginning of the space race to the moon. At a time when Soviet achievements were capturing headlines, particularly with the success of Uri Gagarin becoming the first human in space, JPL tasked itself with pioneering long-range robotic spacecraft ambitions. From the first successful encounter with Venus with Mariner 2, Mariner 9 imaging an enormous canyon stretching across a quarter of the planet Mars, Mariner Valley, and finally Mariner 10, which explored Mercury for the first time, these operations were the groundwork for future deep space exploration. Any mission since can claim its roots in the Mariner program.

Pittsburgh documentary maker and spaceflight historian Jackson Tyler recently released a four-hour documentary on the Mariner Mission Project. With step-by-step clarity, Tyler, a consummate storyteller, details the journey before and through the twelve-year journey of Mariner. “NASA’s Mariner Missions” can be found on “Homemade Documentaries,” a YouTube site.

The spacecrafts known as Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, which visited the outer planets and have now gone beyond the solar system, were first named Mariner 11 and Mariner 12.