Back in the early 1960’s, the North American Space Agency (NASA) began a series of missions to investigate the basic solar structure of the planet Mars. From this there were several spacecraft that were launched in series which all belonged to a project named “Mariner”.
Mariner 4 flew by Mars in July 1965
Mariner 6 & 7 flew by in 1969
Mariner 8 was lost in route to Mars
Mariner 9 flew by in 1971
referencehttp://starryskies.com/solar_system/mars/spacecraft.html
All of the spacecraft that reached their destination fulfilled their intended purpose, but my question is: “Whatever became of them once their missions were completed”?
None of these spacecraft were either landers of orbiters, they were all designed as “Flyby craft”. After flying past Mars, did they continue a direct line straight out of the solar system? Did they start a circular path and start circling the sun? Whatever became of these multi-million craft? Anyone know?
Correction: The purpose of these missions were ** not** to study the “solar” structure of the planet Mars. I believe they were intended to study the surface features and atmospheric composites" The word “Solar” was a typograhical error
Given that the Pioneer 10 probe was the first man-made object to leave the Solar System, I would guess that the Mariner probes are all still orbiting the Sun somewhere. I would also be surprised, however, if NASA is still tracking them; so I doubt that anyone knows exactly where they are.
Long story short: The flyby spacecraft are orbiting the Sun. Because they are no longer transmiting to Earth, and they are small, they are basically impossible to track now. The orbiters were place in high orbits, and are, barring abduction by aliens, still there. I can’t find any reference to anyone tracking their orbits, though presumably they’d be a bit easier to find than the flybys—we could predict the decay of their orbits due to drag, and probably model the orbits pretty well. I guess the challenge to tracking them down would be finding an appropriate imaging system. The cameras on the orbiters there tend to look down and they’re busy doing science, so a search for old spacecraft would probably not considered a good use of time. Mariner 4 is on a heliocentric orbit.
FYI, Mariner 9 is, per this story, still orbiting Mars (though I doubt NASA keeps close tabs on any of these probes, else they would have been less surprised by this pic).
