CU Boulder Celebrates Mars Milestone

BOULDER, Colo. (CBS4)- University of Colorado Boulder scientists are celebrating a big milestone in space history. It's been 50 years since NASA's first brush with Mars.

CU Boulder Mars expert professor Nick Schneider says the Mars connection to Colorado is a big one.

The Mariner spacecraft was sent out for Mars exploration with help from CU Boulder in 1969.

"We put an instrument on this that discovered a cloud of the used to be a part of water escaping from Mars, that was 50 years ago," said Schneider.

CU Boulder has been building instruments to measure planetary atmospheres since the 1940s, even before NASA was created.