Colour by numbers

Image credit: NASA/JPL

It may not look like much compared to today's amazing footage from Perseverance, but this pastel drawing is the very first image of Mars. "Nasa's Mariner 4 completed the first successful flyby of Mars in the summer of 1965. The spacecraft had a camera onboard to capture Martian vistas, but transmitting all the data to Earth was slow, taking 19 days. So while waiting for Earth-bound electronics to convert the data into fully processed images, Richard Grumm of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory decided to take matters into his own hands. He stapled strips of paper with incoming pixel brightness values onto a wall and then hand-coloured the numbers with corresponding pastels."  A lovely example of art science crossover.

Image credit: NASA/JPL

 

Image credit: NASA/JPL

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/first-view-of-mars-was-a-paint-by-numbers/