 This week I'm talking about really cool retro space data. Essentially, I was at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory this week and I came across this amazing story about Mariner 4 and the very first image of Mars that ever appeared on television. In 1965, Mariner 4 was the very first spacecraft to do a successful flyby of Mars, and it produced the very first image of Mars from the vantage point of space. As you can imagine, getting the very first image of Mars from space was an incredibly exciting feat and everyone was incredibly impatient on the ground waiting for the officially processed images from NASA. In fact, employees from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory were so incredibly impatient to see if the camera that they had put on the spacecraft was successful that they decided to see if they could actually look at the data itself and actually produce a visualization of the Mars imagery before the officially processed image came out. So what these employees ended up doing is that they actually ended up printing out these incredibly really long thin strips of ticker tape with all the data numbers on them, essentially all the numbers that corresponded to all the different illumination pixels on the image, and they printed out these really long pieces of ticker tape and then stapled them all up to a wall side by side. They then went to a local art store and requested to have a bunch of chalk that was in grayscale that would correspond with the image data that they would be getting from the spacecraft, but the local art store didn't have any chalk in grayscale. All they had were colored pastels, so what the JPL employees ended up doing is they actually ended up using a red color scale to do sort of a paint by numbers of all these pieces of ticker tape. What they didn't know was that Mars is actually in fact a fairly red planet, so it actually ended up quite nicely. So a team at JPL actually scrambled back and actually began doing a paint by numbers of all the different numbers on all this ticker tape, and they produced this beautiful image of the surface of Mars. They were doing this just to simply test if their camera was working on the spacecraft, but the media was also getting so incredibly patient to see the very first image of Mars from space that the media actually took what they had produced in colored pastel and put it on television. So this colored pastel paint by numbers data visualization actually became the very first image of Mars from space that was ever put on television, which is actually really cool. I just absolutely love stories like this that are essentially about hacking space exploration and actually brute forcing space data visualization when you get too impatient to wait for official images to be released. I think it's incredibly cool to see it from the 1960s, and it's incredibly cool to still see it today. So if you enjoyed this space pod, remember to subscribe on YouTube, donate to the Patreon campaign, and leave a comment.