Mariner 10 - Cruise To Venus

Cruise To Venus

A trajectory correction maneuver was made on November 13, 1973. Immediately afterwards, the star-tracker locked onto a bright flake of paint which had come off the spacecraft and lost tracking on the guide star Canopus. An automated safety protocol recovered Canopus, but the problem of flaking paint recurred throughout the mission. The on-board computer also experienced unscheduled resets occasionally, which necessitated reconfiguring the clock sequence and subsystems. Periodic problems with the high-gain antenna also occurred during the cruise. In January 1974, Mariner 10 made ultraviolet observations of Comet Kohoutek. Another mid-course correction was made on January 21, 1975.