Mariner 2

Mariner 2 was an American space probe to Venus and the first robotic space probe to report successfully from a planetary encounter. It was the first successful spacecraft of the NASA Mariner program, an exact copy of the earlier Mariner 1 which had failed at launch, and a simplified version of the Ranger program Block I spacecraft design. Mariner 2 launched from Cape Canaveral on August 27, 1962, and passed within about 34,773 kilometers of Venus on December 14, 1962, carrying far less instrumentation than the Soviet Venera probes of the same period, including no television camera.