Talk:Mariner 1

Mariner 2 was not a backup probe
According to Tracking and Data Acquisition Support for the Mariner Venus 7962 Mission, the second probe was to be launched even in the event of a failure of Mariner 1. I remove the sentence about the backup status.

BTW, I wrote in the french article that they were planned to launch in a 24-27 days interval and flyby Venus in a 3-14 days interval, but I can't find again this fact in the above reference were it was supposed to be. Duc ky sm ok ton blabla 12:03, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

POV marring section titled ""The most expensive hyphen in history""
I do not flatly deny the contents of the section in question. To be quite frank, it seems very thoughtfully and reasonably written by an at least moderately knowledgeable person. However -- if you read the section, you will see that it very much presents an interpretation of facts that are admittedly little known. It is very speculative without warning a less-knowledgeable reader that it is so. In essence, the whole section is written as an opinion on whatever caused the probe's destruction and its consequences -- and not as an exploration of said causes or as a revelation of the scarce evidence that there is. For example, I have read elsewhere that Arthur Clarke was the source for the quotation in the title. Maybe I am wrong, but the use of quotes indicates that someone spoke it first, and that source should be cited. I propose that someone intimate with the project's history does a toned-down rewrite of that section. SrAtoz (talk) 20:17, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

Apollo vs Mariner
The Apollo program has a space mission box, where the follow-up and preceeding missions can be easily seen. Is there a reason why such a box is not used for this unmanned mission? Sae1962 (talk) 07:43, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Mariner 1
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Mariner 1's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "LL": From Mariner 2:  From Mars 2MV-4 No.1:  

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 10:06, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Mariner 1 Post Flight Review Board report? hyphen in data-editing software?
One NASA source says that ''the Mariner 1 Post Flight Review Board determined that the omission of a hyphen in coded computer instructions in the data-editing program allowed transmission of incorrect guidance signals to the spacecraft. During the periods the airborne beacon was inoperative the omission of the hyphen in the data-editing program caused the computer to incorrectly accept the sweep frequency of the ground receiver as it sought the vehicle beacon signal and combined this data with the tracking data sent to the remaining guidance computation. This caused the computer to swing automatically into a series of unnecessary course corrections with erroneous steering commands which finally threw the spacecraft off course.''  This is a very different account from the others, and it omits lots of relevant details. I wonder if the referenced Mariner 1 Post Flight Review Board report is available online, when it was produced, etc. so we can check it more completely. I couldn't find it in a quick search. ★NealMcB★ (talk) 05:35, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
 * This is an interpretation by a modern writer, no one would *ever* have referred to the logic branch in question a "data-editing software" and that would have been beyond conception at the time. The issue was in a failure condition where the data uplinked failed the sanity checks, and the alternate (and temporary) configuration had a bug in it. It was not a hyphen but no one would have understood "overbar" which represents a filtered value. There's nothing too mysterious about this, the entire section in question is more of a semantics exercise than it is an engineering evaluation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.91.173.34 (talk) 20:34, 9 May 2018 (UTC)