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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 August 2015
Before the space era, Mars was thought to be like the earth; after Mariner 4, Mars seemed to be like the moon; Mariners 6 and 7 have shown Mars to have its own distinctive features, unknown elsewhere within the solar system.
The successful flyby of Mariner 4 past Mars in July 1965 opened a new era in the close-range study of planetary surfaces with imaging techniques. In spite of the limited return of data, Mariner 4 established the basic workability of one such technique, which involved use of a vidicon image tube, on-board digitization of the video signal, storage of the data on magnetic tape, transmission to the earth at reduced bit rate by way of a directional antenna, and reconstruction into a picture under computer control. Even though the Mariner 4 pictures covered only about 1% of Mars's area, they contributed significantly to our knowledge of that planet's surface and history [1, 2, 15, 17].