Why NASA used Paint By Numbers to Make Their First Mars Picture
Scott Manley Scott Manley
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 Published On Nov 19, 2022

Mariner 4 would be the first successful deep space spacecraft to fly by another planet and take a close up image of the surface. The data rates were so low that it would take 8 hours to downlink the 200x200 images to Earth before the computers could start processing the image and printing them out.
Engineers who had been working on the camera system famously short circuited the process and began assembling their own image using strips of telemetry printout and colouring them with pastels bought from a local art store.

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