Mariner 1 was a NASA spacecraft. It was the first spacecraft in the Mariner program. Mariner 1 was planned to do a Venus fly-by. However, it was destroyed by the Range Safety Officer 293 seconds after launch. It was destroyed because the rocket moved off course and was a safety risk. Mariner 1 was followed by Mariner 2.
Why it was destroyed
The Atlas-Agena rocket was controlled by a hand-written formula:
Which means "the nth smoothed value of the time derivative of a radius R". However, for this mission, an overline (‾) was missing in the formula, which looks something like this:
Because the smoothing function was missing, the rocket became sensitive at minor changes. Then, the rocket became out of control and destroyed by the Range Safety Officer.[1][2][3] Few years later, Arthur C. Clarke wrote that Mariner 1 was "wrecked by the most expensive hyphen in history".[4]
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