Engineers Hand-Colored Mars' First Photo With Art Pastels

In 1965, NASA engineers waiting for the first close-up photo of Mars decided eight hours was too long to wait, so they grabbed pastels and made it themselves.

On July 14, 1965, the Mariner 4 spacecraft flew past Mars and beamed back 21 photographs encoded as streams of numbers. These numbers represented brightness values for each pixel, printed onto long strips of teletype paper at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

JPL's computers needed eight and a half hours to convert those numbers into a viewable image. The engineers weren't having it.

Richard Grumm, the scientist in charge of the data system, had an idea straight out of a paint-by-numbers kit. He'd assign colors to number ranges, print the data strips, staple them to a wall, and hand-color each number to create a visible image before the official photo was ready.

There was just one problem: JPL didn't stock art supplies in the middle of a Mars mission. Grumm walked to a local art store to buy plain grey chalk that would match the expected black-and-white photograph.

The store clerk had other ideas. Hearing what the chalk was for, they convinced Grumm to buy proper Rembrandt pastels in yellows, reds, oranges, and browns instead.

Back at the lab, the team got to work. They cut the printouts into strips, stapled them side by side onto a panel the size of a garage door, and began coloring each number in shifts as data continued arriving.

Hours later, they stepped back to see a colored cross-section of Mars: the planet's curved edge against black space, muted oranges and reds filling its cratered surface, with ticker-tape strips still visible running through the composition.

Here's the beautiful irony: Grumm had wanted grey because the actual photo would be black and white. The clerk upsold him into warm colors. Those colors turned out to match Mars' actual surface almost perfectly.

Mars really does have that rust-red, dusty yellow-orange palette from iron-oxide-rich soil and surface dust. The engineers had chosen those colors based on a shop clerk's sales pitch and accidentally created the first accurately-colored image of another planet in human history.

Why This Inspires

The pastel drawing was finished hours before the official image. When journalists arrived to cover the mission's success, someone let them see it first.

That hand-colored improvisation made it onto television before the actual photograph. For a brief window in July 1965, America's first glimpse of Mars up close was a paint-by-numbers creation made with art-store supplies by impatient engineers.

The completed image was later framed and presented to JPL Director William Pickering. Six decades later, visitors to JPL in Pasadena can still see it: the ticker tape, the visible numbers beneath pastel shading, the hand-colored face of another world.

Science doesn't always follow the proper channels, and sometimes the most memorable discoveries come from people who simply refuse to wait.