Slice of History - Magellan Rendezvous

Magellan was the first space probe launched by a space shuttle and arrived in Venus’ orbit 35 years ago on 10 August. Following the Challenger disaster in January 1986, Magellan, along with a roster of other spacecraft on the shuttle launch manifest, were delayed, rescheduling Magellan’s launch to 4 May 1989.

Assembled from spare parts left over from various prior missions, including Voyager, Galileo, Ulysses, and Mariner 9, Magellan was deployed from the payload bay of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, and an hour later, a two-stage Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) was fired to send the spacecraft on a trajectory to rendezvous with Venus. After three en-route trajectory corrections, Magellan arrived in Venus orbit on this day, and six days later, the spacecraft suffered a communications outage, but over its lifetime returned 1200 gigabits of data, which far exceeded the 900 gigabits of data returned from all NASA planetary missions combined at the time.

In 1993, controllers commanded Magellan to drop into the outermost regions of the Venusian atmosphere, and that October, contact was lost as the spacecraft was commanded to plunge into the atmosphere to gather aerodynamic data. Magellan burned up in the Venusian atmosphere about 10 hours later after one of the most successful deep space missions.

The memorabilia pictured here includes just some of the materials made to commemorate the great success of the Magellan mission. CL#25-0315

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