Over 50 years in the past, on July 20 1976, NASA achieved one thing fairly unimaginable for humanity and images. At exactly 05:12 PDT the house company efficiently touched down on Mars with the Viking 1 lander, starting the seek for life on our celestial neighbor.
Simply 25 seconds later, the spacecraft – now stationed on Chryse Planitia, a clean, round plain in Mars’ northern hemisphere – snapped the primary ever picture of the floor of the Martian world.
Forty minutes later, again at mission management, the picture started to appear on the pc displays, slowly forming line by line from left to proper.
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Dr Thomas Mutch (1931-1980), who led the Viking lander imaging team, later described the second: “I studied the black display screen, ready for that slim strip that will sign the primary few strains of the primary image. And it appeared. A sliver of digital magic.”
However as a substitute of a rugged, purple, dusty panorama embodying the superb feat that the house company had simply achieved, the Viking 1 lander snapped a considerably underwhelming black-and-white patch of rocky floor no quite a lot of meters sq..
Other than the sprinkling of rocks, the one actual focal point within the picture was one of many spacecraft’s touchdown pads seen within the bottom-right nook. Regardless of this, Dr Mutch would again and again describe the image as “unimaginable.”
Whereas the act of beaming the first-ever picture of the Crimson Planet’s floor again to Earth, 140 million miles away, was actually groundbreaking, the picture itself was by no means meant to be an awe-inspiring depiction of the world that had for thus lengthy captivated astronomers.
It was, in fact, a health check – a photographic thumbs-up to Dr Mutch and the rest of mission control that the Viking 1 lander had successfully completed its trip to the surface and was ready to begin collecting data from ground level.
The following day, Viking 1 captured its first-ever color image, finally revealing the rocky desert surface of the Red Planet as astronomers and the rest of the world had truly envisioned it.
To take this image, as well as the initial famous black-and-white frame, NASA mounted a pair of 16.1lb / 7.3kg facsimile cameras about a meter apart on Viking 1’s upper deck.
Instead of capturing a whole frame at once, each camera used a vertical array of photodetectors and a pivoting mirror to scan the Martian landscape line by line, operating like a slow fax machine to deliver a stereoscopic (3D) view.
For grayscale images, light passed straight to the detectors without filters. These took less time to record and transmit back to Earth – ideal for immediate post-landing checks – which is why NASA programmed Viking 1 to render the first image in black-and-white.
Color photos took significantly longer to process, as the cameras needed to scan the exact same scene three separate times, each time passing the light through separate red, green and blue optical filters.
Back on Earth, mission control computers – which received the image data at 250 bits per second via the Viking 1 orbiter – combined the three individual color channels into a single photograph.
By the late 1990s, Mars research vehicles had shifted from static landers like Viking 1 and later Viking 2 to mobile rovers able to roam the Martian landscape in their pursuit of signs of life.
In 1997, as part of the Pathfinder mission, NASA landed the Sojourner rover, which valiantly analyzed Martian rocks and soil for a total of about 85 Earth days – a month beyond its expected lifespan.
To this day NASA continues to explore the Red Planet with rovers like Perseverance, which landed in 2021 looking for evidence of past microbial life.
However, none of these mobile research missions would ever have been possible without Viking 1 and the initial grayscale image captured on its facsimile cameras 50 years ago, which provided the first vital clues about the planet’s regolith.
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