Why NASA used Paint By Numbers to Make Their First Mars Picture
2022 ж. 18 Қар.
189 719 Рет қаралды
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.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine the suspense in the room as those 63's kept printing out.
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
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.
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.
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.
This painting the first image by number manually still gives me goosebumps!
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.
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.
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.
in just 50 years we went from white and black blobs to 1080p video of a drone being flown on mars
SCOTT MANLEY SAID THERE ARE CIRCULAR CREATURES ON MARS!!!
'Paint-by-number' sets were popular in the 60s, so, not such a stretch.
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.
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 KZhead comment ever.
Absolutely awesome piece of work! Thank you for taking the time to discuss the first science done of Mars from using spacecraft. Love this.
Fabulous episode! Fascinating moment in history. Keep going, you are doing great!
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.
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.
Now THAT is a priceless piece of artwork. Not some banana taped to a wall.
Nice video, as always. One can learn a great deal by watching Scott’s videos. Thank you, Scott.
One of your best videos yet! Awesome stuff Scott
~@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.
Engineers doing paint by number to get an image out before the fancy stuff happened. I can't argue.
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 👍
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 :)
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!
Amazing what JPL was able to accomplish with such rudimentary technology
Scott, your videos are simply outstanding!
Well done, @Scott! This was a wonderfully told historical story!
Was literally thinking about this incident yesterday. great synchronicity, Scott!
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
Wow! Great research on this video! Thank you for sharing this with us!
Great video. Well researched, well narrated and well edited. Well done!
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!
Scott, that's so cool. Thanks for sharing this story 👌
Thank you for sharing Scott.🙂🙂
Space exploration history is just as much fascinating as the ongoing endeavors. Thank you so much for bringing these incredible stories to us.
I love your videos but this has to be one of my favorites so far. Great history of space probe technology. Thank you!
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.
Brilliantly absorbing from start to finish.
Imagine how disappointing it would be to think there would be lots of constructed features, only to find a dead planet.
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
This is Beautiful. I really appreciate you sharing this story with the world
oh man, engineers too excited to wait and start processing the data themselves via paint by numbers
The most epic color-by-number picture ever.
awesome, thanks for this marvellous piece of history and great storytelling scott!
A fun & interesting video. Thx Scott! 😊
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.
Just wonderful re the colouring in!
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! 😁
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
I remember 300 baud modems and watching the screen literally paint from a BBS.
I really want a poster of that now, that looks so cool
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.
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.
Notable moment in history where science and art broadened our horizons ;)
Astronomy, paint by numbers edition 😊It never ceases to amaze me how much data could be gleaned from such comparatively limited hardware.
Absolutely fascinating
I love stories like this or the contraband corned beef sandwich from the early space program, thanks for bring these to us!
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".
Lovely tale. Can see the inspiration to the Space Age Science Fiction stories and comics. Thank for the Story Friend
Always interessting. Thanks
Thanks Scott
Great story, thank you, Scott
I remember there was one guy with a pencil drawing image blocks one section at a time from raw printouts...
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,
What a great bit of history. Thanks.
fantastic historical footage
Wow I learn about Canopus and it's relationship to Dune all in 10 seconds! Outstanding!
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.
That's all very neat! Reminded me of the fax machine demonstration in 'The Secret Life Of Machines'.
Nice bit of space exploration history.
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.
“Circular creatures” - life confirmed on mars.
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
"You get used to it. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead."
Great video!
Seriously interesting Scott! TFS, GB :)
Mariner 4's flyby was the day I was born. It was a huge headline in my home town newspaper. So I've always taken it as my astrological sign" :)
Great story, well told!
I was 9 years old. I remember feeling disappointed that the experts were saying Mars was probably dead after all.
Great story about some very intelligent, clever, & creative people!
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.
Very cool story! Thank you!
That pastel picture is a Holy Relic for non religious geeks everywhere.
G'day Scott! Hope you've had a good week. :)
Great story. Thank you!
Back when interplanetary science was something you could stick on the refrigerator
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.
Good stuff!
Fascinating !