A Child's Game

Right around the time I was conceived, NASA launched a probe called Mariner 4, loaded with instruments and telemetry, on a 3 year mission to Mars and beyond. Mariner 4 flew by Mars on July 14th and 15th, 1965, when I was a month old. It took 21 digital photographs (what, you thought that was new?) using alternating red, green and blue filters, covering some 1% of the planet's surface. These images were stored on tape inside the spacecraft until it passed safely behind Mars and reacquired radio contact with Earth. The images were then broadcast to Earth and retransmitted via a sophisticated series of microwave relays to Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) in Pasadena, CA. This process continued until August 3rd. Each of the 21 photos was transferred twice to minimize data loss.

 

Total data transmitted from Mariner 4 to Earth: 5.2 million bits, or about 650 KB. The size of one low-rez snapshot you might post on Facebook.

 

Sporadic communication with Mariner 4 continued into December 1967 but its mission was largely completed with the Mars flyby. The probe was continually pelted with micro meteors and space dust, which altered its course dramatically. On December 7th 1967 the attitude control system failed and communication was terminated on December 21st.

 

Mariner 4 is now in a highly eccentric "outside" orbit around the sun, where it will remain, barring some catastrophic impact with debris, until the end of our solar system some 5 billion years from now.

 

The scientists learned much from the little grainy pictures, about the composition and structure of our nearest neighbor. The photos even helped select the landing sites for the Viking Landers that would come along ten years later.

 

But it was the culture that was affected most. The photographs from Marnier 4 changed the way we viewed Mars forever. Mars wasn't an alien planet full of little green men anymore, that image, so burned into the our imaginations, evaporated in the blink of an eye. Science fiction writers abruptly stopped writing about aliens from Mars and started writing about aliens from other solar systems.

 

Mars was now a place as wonderful and real as the Earth.

 

So what about the child-like drawing at the top of this post? Well, when the photographic data were being received, JPL used a "real-time data translator" to convert the digital image data to numbers printed on thin strips of paper. Scientists were so anxious to get a look at the very first pictures of Mars ever taken from space, that they couldn't wait for the official processed final versions. And being scientists, they came up with a way to look at one of the photos right away: They attached the paper numbered images to a panel and hand-colored them, by numbers, using crayons.

 

All the technology in the world couldn't replace good old crayons and paper and color-by-numbers.

 

And so it came to be that this beautiful crayon drawing that looks as if it was done by a grade school child is the first picture of another world ever returned from space.