Mars in Crayons

Back from my honeymoon! Starting today I'll be blogging at my normal pace (e.g., about 3 posts per week). Here's an interesting story that I originally came across on Boing Boing Gadgets posting... but the real details were provided by a comment by Dan Goods in response to the BBG post.

Dan Goods wrote:

Howdy... I co-curated the "Data + Art" show that this was in and interviewed Richard Grumm who is the one who made the image (his initials "RLG" can be seen in the lower right hand corner). The original JPL description is a little outdated...The story is that mangers for the mission were unsure if the tape recorder on Mariner 4 was working correctly.

After the flyby of the planet it would take several hours for the computers to process a real image. There had been some anomalous errors pointing towards the tape recorder so everyone was a little freaked out that they were not going to get any images. So Mr. Grumm, who oversaw the tape recorder, and his crew decided to prove one way or the other. The engineers thought of different ways of taking the 1’s and 0's from the actual data to create an image and decided that printing out the digits and coloring over them was the most efficient.

So Mr. Grumm went to a local art store and was looking for a set of chalk in different grays. The art store replied that they "did not sell chalk" (as that was too low for them, only convenience stores sold "chalk"), but they did have colored pastels. Richard did not want to spend a lot of time arguing with them, so he just picked them up, printed out the 1's and 0's and his team colored them by their brightness level. Though he used a brown/red color scheme the thought that mars was red did not enter his mind. He really was looking for the colors that best represented a grey scale, since that was what they were going to get anway. It is uncanny how close to the actual colors of mars he was as they look like they came right out of current images of the planet. I've seen some of the other color schemes he tried and it could have been green or purple!

Continue reading on Dan Goods's blog.