Editing Mariner 1 (section)

===Flight plan and ground operations===

[[File:Woomera 1964 0(1).jpg|thumb|120px|The communications station at Woomera]]

The launch window for Mariner, constrained both by the orbital relationship of Earth and Venus and the limitations of the Atlas Agena, was determined to fall in the 51 day period from July 22 through September 10.<ref name=treasury/>{{rp|174}} The Mariner flight plan was such that the two operational spacecraft would be launched toward Venus in a 30-day period within this window, taking slightly differing paths such that they both arrived at the target planet within nine days of each other, between December 8 and 16.<ref name=avweek1962a/> Only Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 12 was available for the launching of Atlas-Agena rockets, and it took 24 days to ready an Atlas-Agena for launch. This meant that there was only a 27-day margin for error for a two-launch schedule.<ref name=treasury/>{{rp|174}}

Each Mariner would be launched into a [[parking orbit]], whereupon the restartable Agena would fire a second time, sending Mariner on its way to Venus (errors in [[trajectory]] would be corrected by a mid-course burn of Mariner's onboard engines).<ref name=report/>{{rp|66–67}} Real-time radar tracking of the Mariner spacecraft while it was in [[parking orbit]] and upon its departure the [[Atlantic Missile Range]] would provide real-time radar tracking with stations at [[Ascension Island|Ascension]] and [[Pretoria]], while [[Palomar Observatory]] provided optical tracking. Deep space support was provided by three tracking and communications stations at [[Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex|Goldstone, California]], [[RAAF Woomera Range Complex|Woomera, Australia]], and [[Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory|Johannesburg, South Africa]], each separated on the globe by around 120° for continuous coverage.<ref name=report/>{{rp|231–233}}