Why the US can’t send humans to Mars
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1965: Mars’ first close-up
In the meantime, NASA knew it needed more information about Mars before it landed humans there. So, in 1964, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched the very first probe to fly by Mars: Mariner 4.
The images the probe transmitted to Earth were fuzzy and showed a desolate, barren planet. But they were the first close-up images of Mars’s surface that anyone on Earth had seen.
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