(Agr) The July 14, 2015 will remain a historic day for astronomy: New Horizons flies over Pluto. But fifty years ago, July 15, 1965, astronomy was celebrating another great mission: that of the US space probe Mariner 4, the first to succeed in the flyby of Mars. To commemorate that historic event, NASA has made a video that explains the five characteristics of Mariner 4: The probe found his bearings with the stars, as did the sailors many centuries ago. Mariner 4 was also the first US spacecraft to send to the ground close-up pictures of another planet, namely 22 photographic images, and also the first to send digital images from another planet. For these reasons Mariner 4 was a pioneer of digital interplanetary communication and it was a big point in favor of the Americans in the space race against the Soviets during the Cold War.
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