NASA launched the Mars Global Surveyor from Cape Canaveral, opening a chapter of planetary exploration as the agency’s first mission to Mars in nearly two decades.
The spacecraft lifted off on a Delta II rocket from launch complex LC-17A on November 7, 1996, according to Kosmonautix.
After a ten-month transit, the spacecraft entered orbit on September 12, 1997, utilizing the friction of the upper atmosphere—a technique known as aerobraking—to shrink its path while conserving fuel. A solar panel issue stretched that process into a 17-month maneuver, pushing the start of systematic mapping to March 1999.
Instruments Map the Red Planet
The Mars Orbiter Camera deployed narrow-angle and wide-angle lenses, returning more than 240,000 images that captured craters, canyons, sand dunes, and dust storms with a resolution roughly ten times sharper than previous Viking mission photos. The orbiter carried a suite of scientific instruments to examine the planet’s surface, atmosphere, and magnetic field.
Magnetometer and electron reflectometer instruments studied the planet’s magnetic properties, revealing regions of crustal remnant magnetization pointing to an ancient global magnetic field, while radio measurements refined internal structure and gravity field models. The spacecraft also spotted surface channels appearing to have been formed by running water, and observed signs of possible climate change at the south pole.
Operations End in Sudden Silence
Operations ended abruptly following a routine maneuver with the solar panels on November 2, 2006, when communication with the spacecraft was lost.
Investigations indicated the failure stemmed from a chain of problems linked to a data edit error within the flight computer’s memory, which accidentally exposed one of the batteries to the sun and caused a loss of power that silenced the spacecraft forever in November of 2006.