19921776 Club
A Titan rocket lifts Mars Observer off the Florida coast
The first mission of NASA's Planetary Observer program heads for Mars after a decade of delays and a near-miss with Hurricane Andrew.
NASA had not sent a spacecraft to Mars since the Viking landers in the 1970s. On September 25, 1992, a Commercial Titan III rocket carried Mars Observer off Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral at 17:05:01 UTC, bound for orbit around the red planet to study Mars's surface, atmosphere, and climate. The 1,018-kilogram spacecraft carried seven science instruments after budget overruns forced two others off the manifest. The journey to Mars took eleven months…
