A Planet Painted by Hand

The full hand-painted image of Mars made by JPL in 1965. Credit: JPL

The Perseverance rover has sent more than a hundred thousand high-resolution images of the Red Planet since it landed on Mars in February 2021, which allows anyone with an internet connection to view photographs (including selfies) taken by a robot on another world. But it was not always so easy to obtain detailed images from another planet.

In 1965, the Mariner 4 mission flew by Mars and snapped 22 images of the planet using a television camera, the first pictures of the planet taken up close. The spacecraft relayed the raw numerical data back to mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (which Caltech manages for NASA), whose engineers could reconstruct these data into an image.

Impatient to see the official processed image, the telecommunications team rebuilt the picture themselves. They printed out the numbers on strips of paper, attached them side by side, and developed a color key that matched the numbers to their appropriate colors. They then hand-colored strips as in a paint-by-numbers image. The resulting pastel “photograph” was framed and gifted to JPL’s then-director, William H. Pickering. —LORI DAJOSE