On 14 July 1965 Mariner 4 performed the first successful flyby of the planet Mars. It captured the first images of another planet (ie not of Earth a moon) ever taken from deep space.
The pictures of a cratered, seemingly dead world drastically changed the view of the scientific community of the possibility of life on Mars – from possible to improbably if not impossible. Mariner 4 (together with Mariner 3 known as Mariner–Mars 1964) was the fourth in a series of spacecraft designed by NASA for planetary exploration in a flyby mode. It was designed to conduct closeup scientific observations of Mars and to transmit these observations to Earth.
