The incredible true story of how a team of scientists compiled the first image of Mars one tiny piece at a time
The engineers printed out the series of ticker tape strips of paper with numbers on them indicating how bright each pixel of the first image was going to be, and put them on the wall.
Goods wrote that Grumm picked up some pastels from a nearby art store, and chose the most perfect color palette imaginable — especially considering the final image was going to arrive in black and white.
It is uncanny how close his color scheme is to the actual colors of Mars. It's as if they came right out of current images of the planet," Goods wrote. "I've seen some of the other color schemes he tried and it could have been green or purple!
The brown bottom of the image is space, while the light area in the middle represents the edge of Mars. The other colors are mostly clouds.
Considering how beautiful the colored-in image is, the real one may have been a bit of a letdown:
It was an exciting experience to realize that we were actually receiving knowledge from a man-made machine almost 150 million miles away," Robert B. Leighton, who led the Mariner 4 team, wrote in Scientific American the following year. "Of course we were seeing only a sequence of bare numbers. What would the picture look like? Eight hours seemed an eternity to wait.
Source: Scientific American
We've since sent a few more spacecraft to orbit Mars, and landed rovers on its surface. The images we can get of the Red Planet today make the first one look like nothing at all.
But its story captures the excitement that we'll likely feel the first time humans land on Mars — instead of just robots.
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