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Mariner 2 and its Legacy: 50 Years on

Fifty years ago, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) built and flew the first successful spacecraft to another planet: Mariner 2 to Venus. This paper discusses the context of this mission at a crucial phase in the space race between the USA and USSR and its results and legacy. As its first major success, Mariner 2 helped to cement JPL's position as a centre for robotic planetary exploration. Mariner 2 successfully solved the scientific problem of the high temperature observed for Venus by ground-based radio telescopes. It also pioneered new techniques for observing the atmosphere of a planet from space, which were subsequently developed into the microwave sounding and infrared sounding techniques for observing the Earth atmosphere. Today these techniques provide some of the most important data for constraining weather forecasting models, as well as a key series of data on the Earth's changing climate.