Engineers waiting for the first images of Mars to be transmitted used these pastels to create a color version of the first TV image of Mars.

July 15, 2011

Engineers waiting for the first images of Mars to be transmitted used these pastels to create a color version of the first TV image of Mars. They wanted to confirm that the tape recorder on the spacecraft had recorded the data, which would be sent to Earth as binary code and then converted into numbers. Each number, from 0 to 63 (with 0 being white and 63 being black). They chose colors to match the ranges of grey tones they thought they would see, and got to work. Over several hours, they cut the teletype paper into strips, hung them up on a wall, and took turns coloring in the numbers.

Credits

NASA/JPL-Caltech

ENLARGE

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