Well, we know that Mariner I failed because of a fault in the internal guidance computer ... but that was a mission to Venus ...
What about Mariner III and its nose cone separation failure ?
Who manufactures the shroud ...
The manufacturer of the shroud itself might have been JPL as they produced the spacecraft.
The Atlas launch vehicle was build by CONVAIR ( Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation ), which became later part of General Dynamics ...
The Agena upper stage was developed by Lockheed for the USAF ...
Probably NASA-JPL had to build the shroud as they knew best how to fit in the tiny spacecraft

Any suggestions ?

Mariner 1 went off course becasue of a hyphen left out of the code for its guidance computer.

Ted:

There was an earlier discussion about this...

I'll try to find it.

Bob Shaw

Please stick to the topic of Mariner III guys & girls ...

Was Mariner 3 the one where the insulation lining the inside of the shroud tangled on the craft?

Can't recall where I read this.

There might have been a launch where the pressure equalization during ascent failed, and the trapped air in the shroud popped it off early and the slipstream tore up the payload.

Sorry I can't recall more for this.

All I could find in the NASA tech reports was a long paper about the telemetry system that included this comment about Mariner 3:

Well I’ve checked my ‘vintage photos’ collection and found 2 NASA photos showing the Shroud being lowered ontop the Mariner D spacecraft… nothing mentioned about who build the nose cone of the Atlas launcher

Wikipedia gives a good account of Mariner 1. At least I think it does. I've seen in print the claims that Wikipedia says are in error. Whenceforth cometh the truth... It sounds like the Wikipedia source is wiser, but how would we know?

Old NASA books, technical reports and photos are a reliable source
Meanwhile a photo of the shroud being lowered over Mariner 64 has been posted
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...pe=post&id=5993

still searching confirmation if CONVAIR built the shroud as they were responsible for the Launch-vehicle

You are thinking of one of the little-publicized Pioneer probes launched
in 1959-1960, none of which made it anywhere near the Moon.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog?sc=PIONX

Color launch photo of Pioneer P-3 here:

http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/jodrell/Able5.htm

More details here:

http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/jodrel...1.htm#Ablestart

http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/histind/USMoon/USMoon.html

Only Pioneer 5, which this group of lunar probes resembled, was successful
in terms of exploring space at least.

Yep -- the one where a pressure buildup inside the inadequately vented shroud caused it to pop off (after which the wind blast caused the probe and the third stage to follow suit) was the first of the Atlas-Able Pioneer lunar orbiters in November 1959. I just had a discussion on that program (and its very strange beginnings as an abortive 1959 Venus probe plan) yesterday on the "Mariner Mars 1964" thread in this very section. This launch also has the dubious distinction of being NASA's own very first attempted probe of another world (the five earlier Pioneers were Air Force and Army projects).

As for Mariner 3, the shroud was inadequately tested -- with the result that a pressure buildup inside its hollow honeycomb-structure interior (consisting largely of laminated fiberglass, and with a "skin" of fiberglass on the inside and outside) caused it to rupture during ascent and thus hang up on some part of the spacecraft. Clayton R. Koppes' excellent 1982 history "JPL and the American Space Program", has a grisly description of one high-ranking executive, after the failure, standing inside the second shroud tapping it with a quarter to try to listen for internal flaws! "When the duplicate shroud was tested in a vacuum chamber, it exploded violently." (One Web document describes it as built by the Lewis Space Flight Center"; but if I remember Koppes' account correctly, Lockheed was a partner in it, and it was a Lockheed official doing that quarter-tapping.) Another first-person Web account says that the mistake was that it was tested both in vacuum and under launch-level heating, but not both at once.

A crash effort devised a replacement shroud made entirely of magnesium that was only slightly heavier, and they got it onto Mariner 4 just in time. JPL's official project description is available on the Web and no doubt contains far more detail, but it's also 353 Mbytes and I haven't downloaded it yet -- nor do I have the relevant section of Koppes' book at home with me right now.

Correct Bruce !

JPL and the American Space Program - Clayton R Koppes
Chapter 10. Mastering the art of building spacecraft
Page 169 ... The shroud was mainly the responsibility of NASA Lewis Research center in Cleveland, which handled the launch-to-injection phase, and Lockheed Missile & Space Corporation, which had built the fairing. But JPL engineers quickly assumed the key role.... A Lewis-Lockheed-JPL team worked together to develop a magnesium fairing for Mariner IV ... etc...

Actually, last night I finally screwed my courage (or my stupidity) to the sticking-place and downloaded that entire damned 350-Mbyte JPL review of the early stages of the Mariner Mars 1964 program just to get the straight dope on the shroud -- and got about 20 pages on that subject. I've just skimmed it so far, but it seems to imply that:

(1) The main responsibility for designing the initial faulty shroud (as part of a major year-long program to develop a new lightweight shroud for all Atlas-Agena D probes) apparently actually fell to the Lewis Research Center, whereas Lockheed was mainly responsible for the crash effort to build the new Mariner 4 version. (Fortunately, everyone was on the ball -- the correct theory for the failure, which was that the fiberglass skin had peeled loose, was devised only a day after the failure and proven by tests only a couple of days later.)

(2) The failure can't be put down to serious negligence, as I had previously thought. As that earlier brief Web comment indicated, the failure was due only to a combination of launch frictional heating and vacuum. They had thoroughly tested the shroud for each one separately, but not for both at once -- and established procedure didn't call for them to do so. In short, like the subtle Ranger 6 failure, it looks more like Just One of Those Things.

So, assuming it had happened in today's environment, ITAR would have prevented any publishing of the investigation?