Why NASA used Paint By Numbers to Make Their First Mars Picture
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ก.ย. 2024
- 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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I'm old enough to remember those missions and the great disappointment that Venus was a furnace and Mars was a desert.
So much for Tom Corbett, Space Cadet
Yes, very true!
And honestly fringe science has made its way into many officials agendas who are hell-bent on proving those two planets were originally much like earth and its conditions when in fact there's no solid evidence that Venus or Mars were ever earth like.
Jeff - I’m just a little bit younger than you, but I was really excited to see the images from the surface of Mars in 1976. Now we might as well have people on Mars because we have fantastic images of the surface. I hope we both see some actual high-res video too one day.
Oh, and let’s not forget that we got to see some nice images of Pluto!
I get what you mean. Like, there COULD have been tropical rainforests beneath Venus’s clouds…until the photos prove otherwise. I’m similarly disappointed that all the exoplanets we’ve found so far are lifeless.
In the '80's, before scanners were common and computers were expensive, my boss taught me to record the values on a "strip chart", then cut out the peaks of interest and weigh the paper to calculate the area under the peaks. This also works trying to compute the area of something with a complex boundary. It was literally cut and weigh.
Analog integration! I love it! The Quantitative Physical Science class I took as a high school freshman was one of the most important formal classes of my entire education. One of the exercises was to estimate the area of Tennessee two ways from a printed map of the state: using a planimeter (Google that; it's analog-mechanical and it's amazing) and cutting out the map carefully from a pair of scissors and weighing it with a balance (a pre-measured square inch on the same piece of paper was used as a reference). Both methods came very close.
This is also how biologists calculated the volume of cells. They would make serial sections, image the sections on a transmission electron microscope, and then cut out the parts of each image that belonged to a single cell, and weighing the film. Stacking the cutouts also gave you a pseudo-3D reconstruction of the cell, although the Z-axis aspect ration would be off.
Yep, this was standard technique for finding peak area from any spectrometer that output to an analog pen plotter. The first "integrators" I saw when I was doing research in college seemed almost magic. They weren't very sophisticated, as they simply plotted a sawtooth line where the velocity of the pen moving up and down varied in proportion to the peak height it was interpreting. Instead of weighing the aluminum foil cutouts, you would count the number of times the sawtooth pattern went up and down.
Analog low-tech! Love it! :D
@@bensmith3304 I used to work in a building in Cambridge University that had been established in 1950, and still had some odd old equipment and bits kicking about (apparently they'd not long chucked out an old microscope with attached bellows camera not long before I started). In one room was a complete electron microgram of a rat's brain, made up of probably 50 photos cut up and assembled like a jigsaw.
Thank you for this video! My father-in-law Claude Newman was on the data team at JPL. He worked specifically on the tape recorder and told me, in detail, about the data collection, transmission and image building. It was fascinating!
When You Control The Tape Recorder You Control... Information.
Yes if this isn't enough evidence they've been covering up what Mars really looks like.... what will it take, if you adjust the real colours of Mars it begins to look like Earth with a blue sky, they will threaten you for that.
@@rutgerb that flag you are using belongs to people that just bombed Poland and tried to instigate WWIII by lying and saying it was Russia.
@@chadnuts the only true words you wrote were:"lying" "russia"
@@rutgerb Ukraine literally hit Poland with a missile that killed two people. Zelenski said it was Russia but the evidence proves without a doubt Ukraine fired it.
Wake the hell up and actually research what you are supporting.
If you take their "painting", convert it into the correct aspect ratio, and make it B/W, it's impressively close to the official photo, considering that they were only using 5 shades instead of 64. The main features can definitely be found in the full-depth photo.
I was actually hoping Scott would've done this in the video.
Kinda looks better and more detailed tbh.
The actual photo masks all of the outlines
The magic of being one of the first humans to see something is incredible. Today, even just being the kind of nerd who constantly refreshes a NASA page to see them put up a new image, I know that I've been among the first few thousand humans to see at least a few things.
I remember doing exactly that when they downloaded the first
The really fascinating story for that is that the russians, not having the means to receive a radio transmission from the moon of the first image, had it sent to the jodrell bank radio observatory in the UK, so they could receive the image and print it ... the first image sent from the moon.
I wonder where those drawings ended up? Hopefully, one of the engineers kept them safe and passed them along.
They have the drawing displayed at JPL I'm pretty sure, and they also have the box of partially-used pastels that were used for it.
It’s on display at JPL at the top of the stairs that all our visitors go up when visiting the clean room. The box of pastels is right next to it.
Thats pretty dang cool, as far as precious art goes thats it imo..
Pawn Stars. Not a penny more.
@@fruitbouquet5479 "Gonna have to call in an expert." Brings in Alien Hair Guy.
During some point of early geek memes, pencils were referred to as 'Manual Graphite Display Generators'. Finally, someone automated the pencil and plotters were born. The images we see today are still painted, just without so much human noise added in.
That's like the Marines' name for combat boots: LPCs or Leather Personnel Carriers.
Many current images don't make it to paper, staying firmly on TV screens. Many physical printouts are done with loose powder that is melted onto electrified paper. Some others are done with drops of liquid paint. Plotter technology survives mostly as 3D printers and fabric cutters.
When I was a kid I wanted copies of the Mariner Mars images for myself. All we had were some Newspaper clipping. Finally was able to purchase Mariner 6 photos on slides from the Johnson Smith company. I was so happy when they came in the mail even though my family never had a slide projector lol
Did you try to make your own, with a flashlight, a box, and a sheet?
@@MaryAnnNytowl 😃just tried a flashlight but best was take it to school where they had one
I don't know how it was in the early days, but I was a kid during Apollo, and you could send to NASA and ask for all kinds of things, like pictures, and they'd send them to you. When one of the moon missions were coming up, I'd write a letter to NASA and say something like "I am a school child and we in our class are studying the upcoming trip to the moon on Apollo 14 can you send me some information and pickters so I can learn all about it" and a couple of weeks later you'd get a big envelope with pictures, maps, newsletters and even the detailed schedule of the flight like they gave to reporters. Practically whole press kit. About the only thing they didn't send was a mission patch, which is what I was always hoping for.
I even remember them sending follow-up packages after the flights and after Apollo 13 they sent me an updated full color 8 x 10 photo of the Apollo 13 crew with Jack Swigert instead of Ken Mattingly, and I still have that picture. Most of the other stuff I've lost, unfortunately. It's too late now, but maybe if you had sent to JPL at that time they might have sent the pictures for free. NASA had a big PR budget and were just giving stuff away to the public if you asked for it.
Scott always finds these interesting little historical nuggets. I'd like to see a blink comparison between Mariner 4 images and the same area shot by Hirise or some other high resolution camera, just to get an idea of what those early pictures really show.
Scott, this is one of your best showing the depth of understanding of your "fly safe" attitude. You have embraced the creativity of the engineering staff and presented us with an appreciation of what drove these folks. Well done, mate.
I am grateful for your video. I am also grateful for the foresight that the scientists had, in that they were documenting their process using movie film, so that we could feel that much more connected to the historic moment. :)
Great comment!
So true!
They have this footage but somehow they lost/erased all the original footage of the moon landings.....
@@michaelg4931 are you seriously a moon landing denier and watching a scott manley video?
@@ImNotActuallyChristian No, I just stated that the morons lost/erased some of the most historical film ever made.
Imagine the suspense in the room as those 63's kept printing out.
Dune was also first published in 1965! And Arrakis is in many ways a very Mars-like planet. I cant imagine what it was like for folks reading that book when it came out with the backdrop of these missions!
mars was certainly an inspiration but stuff like Laurence of Arabia, or the USGS Dune survey project he was working on were also inspirations
@@AsbestosMuffins I didnt mean Mars was an inspiration for Dune. We didnt know that Mars was a desert planet when Herbert was writing Dune. I meant that for people reading it, there was a dual revellation happening at the same time.
How charming that this engineers by hand. They actually do a first picture of Mars really impressive. Very inspiring!. Thank you for sharing the story with us
You can't stop a good engineer.
That is so cool. There's something about that 1960s Space Age futurism, the hopeful optimism of it, that is so compelling when you look back on it. Even though technology and science have continued to advance, I sometimes feel like we've lost some of that "big dream" of the mid-20th century.
Technology has continued to advance but our economic systems only cause the wealth created to accrue at the top
the dream is quite big atm, just we are more used to it happening.
The history of space exploration is very nicely explained by showing the humanity of such excited knowledge-hungry scientists. Such a good story. Thanks Scott.
This painting the first image by number manually still gives me goosebumps!
I am so old that I remember these things happening. I'm not sure if we saw the Ranger spacecraft crash into the moon in real time, but I do remember seeing them on television. Those showed what you'd expect, craters and smaller craters getting closer and closer until the screen goes blank or I think it was filled with what we used to call "snow" which was random noise picked up by analog television receivers. Digital screens blank this out, but if you tuned an analog television to a channel where no one was broadcasting, you saw this moving grainy pattern we called snow. Yes, it was possible to tune to an unused channel even when your set only had 12 channels. Usually there were only three active channels in the city, maybe one in the countryside.
Getting back to Mariner and the first Mars flyby. Nobody had any idea what Mars was like. I mean NO FRIGGIN CLUE. The best telescopes made fuzzy images and ordinary people were not allowed to look through them. Our best official dudes looked through the telescopes we had all pooled our money to buy. Every one of those dudes told us a different story about what they saw through our telescopes. Some even saw cities with alien civilizations. Others said those cities had long fallen into ruin. Still others saw jungles of red trees. I kid you not! This was our world the day before the flyby.
I was very young at the time. As an emerging nerd, I had a fascination with dinosaurs, partly because they had this narrative with gigantic animals and science. The animals no longer existed, but we knew that they did exist once because scientists found their bones turned to stone over millions of years. The point is that I wanted to stay up to see if just maybe, the cameras might pick out a dinosaur among the jungle trees. And aside from the fact that the resolution would not pick out something that size, no one on earth could say that this wasn't what was on Mars the day before the flyby. It literally could have been jungles and dinosaurs as far as anyone here knew for sure.
I was so young that the pictures would come down after my bedtime. There was some sort of show on television or possibly they broke in with the news, I'm not sure which, but they did show the pictures on television and it was night time in America. I was still awake later when my dad came to check on my brother and me. I asked what the pictures looked like and he said it looked like the moon. At the time, it was the most disappointing thing that had happened in my life. I really wanted jungle at least.
The universe should owe you a second, happier childhood where Mars has jungles and dinosaurs :(
This is my favorite TH-cam comment ever.
One of the things I tell the young 'uns about old time TV is that when I was a kid, when you turned the TV on you had to wait for it to warm up before a picture appeared. Not for long, maybe 5-10 seconds, but you turned it on, you could see the tubes lighting up in the back, but the screen stayed blank, and then when it warmed up the picture appeared. Then when you turned it off, the picture shrunk down to a tiny dot in the center of the screen which stayed there for maybe 10-15 seconds before disappearing. This wasn't back in the 40's but actually into the 1970's.
I still remember the first time I saw a transistorized TV. My older brother got one for Christmas, I think around 1973 or 74, a little Panasonic B & W, and when he turned it on the picture went on right away with no warm up, I couldn't believe it, LOL.
in just 50 years we went from white and black blobs to 1080p video of a drone being flown on mars
The Viking mission to Mars and Voyager to Jupiter inspired me to get into space science. The images fired my imagination and inspired art and science for me. Fun that they used pastels on a printout of data values! I love the space history. The techniques and technology were not the worst. What a fun junior high or HS project it would be to produce images this way.
It's astounding how much we take for granted in terms of digital imaging and image processing. A lot of spacecraft from the early years of spaceflight had very janky imaging systems. The "one pixel" cameras of Pioneer 10 & 11 and the Viking landers. The CRT based cameras of the Voyagers. The CCD + digital computer with lots of memory and storage era is so luxurious in comparison.
It's actually interesting how by Mariner 6/7, NASA had developed software to remove camera noise, eliminate random concentrations of higher electrical strength on the Vidicon plate where slightly higher levels of light sensitive materials had been deposited.( this mimicked higher light levels so making the image noisier) They also had software to undistort random scan line nonlinear distortions. ( that's why the images have those crosses on them, to undistort the image) and use interpolation to replace bad pixels. Or missing information. The imaging system also used compression to send an apparent higher dynamic range. Remarkable! That is one of the reasons btw that Lunar Orbiter and many soviet probes used photographic film systems, you could get sharp images which you could scan without many of these distortions. However it limits how many images you can take and is very heavy and mechanically vulnerable.
Amazing story! Scott, I really like how you can always bring some interesting piece of scientific history and make it a poetic fairy tale for us "grown up children" ;-) These are my most favorite video format of yours. Looking forward for the most one. Cheers.
'Paint-by-number' sets were popular in the 60s, so, not such a stretch.
Absolutely awesome piece of work! Thank you for taking the time to discuss the first science done of Mars from using spacecraft. Love this.
In the early 2000's, it was all about those Mars rovers. I couldn't get enough when I was a kid. This video was absolutely fantastic :)
I love the idea that there is some shopkeeper who has a version of this story where a very excited nerd burst into their shop one day demanding crayons and saying something about Mars.
LOL yes! XD
Engineers doing paint by number to get an image out before the fancy stuff happened. I can't argue.
Amazing what JPL was able to accomplish with such rudimentary technology
I came to Scott's channel bc I couldn't fly my shitty spacecraft off from Kerbal's gravity and he's the reason why I got to land my even shittier spacecraft onto the surface of Minmus back in 2016 or sth.
Now he's the reason why I'm intrigued about the space and its history more than ever before. Don't you ever stop doing what you are doing, you Magnificent Manliest Scott!
Fabulous episode! Fascinating moment in history. Keep going, you are doing great!
~@12:00 "... a room full of scientists painting by numbers ..." nice phrase. Thank you for painting in the details I didn't know about those early missions.
I fully agree, Scott. Both the charm and _ingenuity_ of the NASA engineers to color in _by hand_ the features of Mars with chalk pastels in a true paint-by-number method, is a wonderful story.
Those early days of space exploration had such earnest excitement, I kinda' miss the technologically "primitive" aspect of it all. Early space science was so terribly new and wide open back then that the least morsel of information was cause to celebrate.
Analog television used an inverted signal, too. It made weaker signals brighter, and vice versa. That’s why TV static is mostly white, not black.
Kinda wild that the first up close image of another world was done by what could be a very, very expensive childrens paint project. Where certain numbers (or bits) on the page mean certain colors
I wonder how the workers at the art store would’ve reacted if they found out what those pastels were used for
What a fascinating story! I knew the engineers "painted" the first Martian image, but I didn't realize Mariner 3 failed due to a fiberglass shroud being crushed by aerodynamic forces against the spacecraft, preventing solar ray deployment. It was interesting in those early days.. two spacecraft were built just in case the one failed. Talk about redundancy!
Not what I was expecting, very cool! 😁
I think we are all guilty of letting the gargantuan achievements of Apollo overshadow the quieter science done at JPL, who never really got their chance to shine until Voyager.
We should be grateful to the amazing NASA archivists keeping all this media in perfect condition ready for Scott and others to dig out these marvellous tales and share then with us.
Not all. As a teenager, I knew a lot more about Voyager than Apollo. :) It's because I read a lot, and the Voyager data was well-suited to big books with high-quality images and text.
The most epic color-by-number picture ever.
Now THAT is a priceless piece of artwork.
Not some banana taped to a wall.
Scott, your videos are simply outstanding!
JPL and the Space Age is probably my favourite series of space docs, and I particularly loved this story - thanks for telling it in more detail!
Astronomy, paint by numbers edition 😊It never ceases to amaze me how much data could be gleaned from such comparatively limited hardware.
One of your best videos yet! Awesome stuff Scott
I was 9 years old. I remember feeling disappointed that the experts were saying Mars was probably dead after all.
This Video Is A Treat! I Could Not Believe The Difference Between 1966 Understanding Of Mars And What We Have Today. It Shows How Great Our Scientific Inheritance Has Grown.
I love stories like this or the contraband corned beef sandwich from the early space program, thanks for bring these to us!
Notable moment in history where science and art broadened our horizons ;)
My college physics prof had a front row seat to the pictures being received.
He told me people referred to the process as "insomnia theater".
Scott, that's so cool.
Thanks for sharing this story 👌
Wow I learn about Canopus and it's relationship to Dune all in 10 seconds! Outstanding!
Thankyou. This was a great idea for a episode. I remember when they received the data.
Do this again please with another project like the Viking landers.
I remember 300 baud modems and watching the screen literally paint from a BBS.
I'm old enough to remember all of this - not the painting bit - thanks again Scott. However, I do remember seeing those first craters and being so disappointed that Mars looked like the moon. Gone were the canals, gone was the idea that Mars had a civilization and gone was the idea of a place teeming with life. Of course over time we sent more probes and got better pictures and Mars, while it has craters, is a much more interesting place (in my opinion) than the moon. Back in those days, it seemed inevitable that we'd have astronauts on Mars by the 1980s but alas, the reality of the difficulty and the expense became obvious.
Though you were disappointed to see Mars has no canals, you were able to see other planets have rings, Pluto has variation of surfaces, and other stars have planets!
I remember there was one guy with a pencil drawing image blocks one section at a time from raw printouts...
I really want a poster of that now, that looks so cool
Wow! Great research on this video! Thank you for sharing this with us!
Do not forget the provenance of that film the Soviet luna orbiters used, being actually US made film that they "got" from the USA by a rather unusual method.
You mean the video I linked explaining this process?
@@scottmanley Yes, though the film was from Kodak, who had developed the method of producing it, for another also top secret mission, that also involved aircraft recovering the film. Later on everybody got to use this film process, as it become a huge commercial success.
Nah, the Luna mission used film from Project Genetrix which put the cameras on Balloons.
@@scottmanley OK thanks then, I was thinking it was Kodak film.
How The Maker of Cheerios 'Helped' The Soviet Space Program
th-cam.com/video/YDs8rz7pRLQ/w-d-xo.html
I remember this from my childhood. exciting times!
I totally understand why the engineers painted the first image by hand. I wouldn't have been able to wait either.
amazing piece of history, and a sharp reminder that YES there was a time before digital cameras, and of how they made do with the technologies available
Have you told this story before? Since I thought I learned it from your videos, and retold it since. Glad to see there is a new reference now.
I don't know if I agree with the characterization that the computers were too slow--remember, the downlink from Mars at the time was 8-1/3 bits per second. Doesn't matter how fast your computer is if you're downloading slower than Compuserve in the 80s.
I recently retired from JPL, and the last time I looked (2018) the “strip” picture was in a frame hanging on the wall of the JPL Public Affairs office.
This is brilliant ! Loved the scenes with the guys watching the teletype going from 063 to 059 and less... Pixel by pixel ! I felt like I was there.
Nice video, as always. One can learn a great deal by watching Scott’s videos. Thank you, Scott.
The digital became a bridge path between. For optical & audio, exposer into main frame realm, this in history would compromise analog-real quality into pixel image & audio translate, which would then require exponentially more procress later in history.
Back when interplanetary science was something you could stick on the refrigerator
Breaking news! Scott Manley accidentally reveals: "Circular creatures on Mars" @10:55
Thank you for telling these kinds of stories Scott, I appreciate the work you put in to represent these historical events in a way that's entertaining to watch 👍
What a cool tour through a fascinating piece of our exploration history! I was terribly disappointed when we were told Venus and Mars weren't like we thought. One, not a lush forest world but a hellscape, and the other, not an ancient civilization with canals but an irradiated desert. A lot of dreams died, then. _~sigh~_
Thanks for the tour, though, Scott! Always make a landing you can walk away from!
There are so many rightly justified awesome stories about feats outside our atmosphere, it is awesome to see the success of something amazing down here.
This is Beautiful. I really appreciate you sharing this story with the world
Thanks for this history lesson. As a kid at the time, I was super interested in all this space stuff. Filling in the blanks is appreciated. I suppose no one had the foresight to save the handmade picture,
Weird.. I thought they had awesome CGI in the 1960's, why didn't they use that?
I'm reliably informed that CGI was used in the moon missions, apparently Stanley Kubrick was a digital animation master... :D
Apparently when China landed their rover on the Farside of the moon some time ago, they found the sound studio where the Apollo Landings were faked 😊
@@dewiz9596 Rumour has it that Curiosity has found the Ares III HAB module in the Acidalia Planitia region of mars with filming equipment and a sound stage as well
i heard kubrick was such a nut for realism he demanded they actually go to the moon to film footage for his fake mission.
@@ImInSpainWithoutTheS Ridiculous, everyone knows Mark Watney died on Sol 6 of the mission
The Voyager missions didn't have the budget for all that. They had to do it for real instead. XD
The film used in Luna 3 was radiation-hardened and temperature-resistant and had been taken from American spy balloons recovered by the Soviets.
Painting that must have been such an unimaginably exciting moment for those people in that room. I got pumped up just watching it now on video 60 years of technological advancements later.
That pastel picture is a Holy Relic for non religious geeks everywhere.
oh man, engineers too excited to wait and start processing the data themselves via paint by numbers
awesome, thanks for this marvellous piece of history and great storytelling scott!
"You get used to it. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead."
Was literally thinking about this incident yesterday. great synchronicity, Scott!
Great story, thank you, Scott
I never put together all those were that Canopus. Now we need some JW time, we must find Arrakis.
Well done, @Scott! This was a wonderfully told historical story!
Amazing that mankind managed to send a probe to another planet before we had the technology to take high resolution digital images. The cold war really messed up our tech tree. :)
I learned this particular story a few months back, from watching one of the documentaries JPL put up on their TH-cam. Those are very worth watching, I might add...
And that's how Mariner killed off the Martians. Another victory for Earth!
A paint by numbers Mars scene.
Love the frank Herbert shout out! Dune is amaz
i love the idea of painting the pictures by numbers
I wonder if the data is still available somewhere. It might be fun to toss it into Excel and do the same thing. Heck, there is a service that will take a photo and turn it into a Lego block art you can assemble.
I had a quick look at the Planetary Data System where most Mars data is stored, but they don't have anything on Mariner 4. The NSSDCA does have Mariner 4 imaging data.
It wasn't that computers were slow (those numbers would have been very quickly converted to an image ), it was that color output devices for computers were not readily available.
Lovely tale. Can see the inspiration to the Space Age Science Fiction stories and comics.
Thank for the Story Friend
Absolutely fascinating
I wonder if the raw image data is available somewhere. It would be a fun little project to create some better pictures from them with modern technology.
Can I link here?
nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/mission_page/MR_Mariner_4_page1.html
If the link got removed by yt, just look up "First close-up image of Mars, from the Mariner 4 spacecraft"
That is cool! They were doing a space painting! 🙂
Amazing how much technology has advanced since then in regards to imaging.
I was in the room when Spirit download its1st photos. It was so fast...totally mind blowing. It looked like giant stratified cliffs, turns out they were like 10 inches tall.
Sometimes I forget how far technology has come since I was a kid. However it also makes me realise how what we consider to be cutting edge today will be just as quaint as this in another 50 years. It’s all relative.
A decade later, and somewhat less primitive, I can remember when Viking landed in 1976 and siting up watching the TV at 3am as the first picture downloaded One...Line...At...A...Time...very slowly. Like, hours slowly.
Always interessting. Thanks