NASA Launched Mars Global Surveyor
On this day · 7 November 1996
After two decades of failed and aborted attempts, one orbiter finally cracked the Red Planet open for a generation of scientists.
On November 7, 1996, NASA launched Mars Global Surveyor aboard a Delta II 7925A rocket shortly after noon from Cape Canaveral. It was the agency’s first successful Mars mission in two decades, ending a long drought of setbacks at the Red Planet.
After a journey of roughly 466 million miles, the spacecraft reached Mars in September 1997 and slipped into orbit. Rather than firing heavy engines to brake, controllers used a fuel-saving technique called aerobraking, dipping the craft into the thin upper atmosphere to gradually tighten its loop into a tidy mapping orbit.
It outlasted every spacecraft sent to Mars before it, operating for nine years and 52 days.
From that vantage, Surveyor reshaped how we see the planet, returning more than 240,000 images and mapping mineral deposits, gullies, and ancient water-carved terrain. It fell silent in November 2006 after losing contact, closing a mission that had been extended three times beyond its original two-year plan.
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