"Unveiling Mars: A Journey of Captivating Images from Space"

The first image of Mars ever seen on television, broadcast in 1965, was not a photo but a "color by numbers" representation of data captured by NASA's Mariner 4 spacecraft. The hand-colored image, created by converting digital data into ones and zeros on ticker tape and coloring them based on brightness, was a way for engineers to validate the spacecraft's hardware. The image, which accurately depicted Mars' colors, became the first shot of Mars from space to be seen on TV. This historic encounter with Mars by Mariner 4 marked the beginning of a series of missions that have revolutionized our understanding of the red planet.