NASA and "Operation: Crayola"

With NASA's $700 million dollar "New Horizons" spacecraft closing in on Pluto, one of the early discoveries that the distant planetoid was reddish in color like Mars. NASA's first mission to explore Mars presented its own problems on depicting the color accurately. Here's an excerpt from my second book "Trailblazing Mars: NASA's Next Giant Leap..."

Arv Kliore was in the mission operations center at JPL as the first grainy image of Mars slowly appeared, one line at a time on a large television screen. It was the planet’s horizon. He and the assembled scientists and reporters all asked, “Is that all?”

It took months of work to assemble Mariner 4 and design its instruments. Engineers faced the loss of Mariner 3 and the hazards of launch day for the backup craft. Then they had to hold off the onslaught of the media and the expectations of the “believers” during the trip to Mars.

For that effort, the planet looked boring.

“There were none of the rift valleys like Valles Marineris, or the majesty of Olympus Mons,” recalled Kliore. “There were just craters. It looked like the Moon.”

“It was pretty cruddy,” stated Bruce Murray from the imaging team.

Worse yet, indications from the instruments on Mariner indicated that Mars was dead. The trapped radiation experiment built by Tom Krimigis showed no radiation around the planet. The Van Allen belt protects Earth from ultraviolet rays streaming from the Sun. No shield like that encircled Mars, so the harmful rays rained down on the surface relentlessly. Arv Kliore’s radio occultation experiment shot radio waves through the Martian atmosphere and found it was mostly carbon dioxide, and a thousand times thinner than the air on Earth. Mars was not the exotic paradise envisioned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the news reports streaming from JPL reflected it.

The New York Times described the twenty-one pictures from Mariner 4 as a “harmful and perhaps fatal blow to the possibility of current or past life on Mars.” The headline in the Times on July 30 read, “Mariner’s Close-Range Photos Indicate That Mars, Like the Moon, Is Lifeless Crater-Pocked Planet.”

Ouch.

Still, the imaging team at JPL worked to make the most of what Mariner 4 had delivered. One reason was that JPL director William Pickering was intently watching the progress of the flight. He had made the cover of Time magazine in March 1963 with the successful flyby of Mariner 2 to the planet Venus. He was depicted gazing upward at the planet while the face of the Greek goddess of love, for whom the planet is named, gazed lovingly back.

The television pictures of Mars from Mariner 4 were grainy at best, and in black and white. Some way had to be found to depict the planet in color. Scientists knew shades of red and tan were present on the planet from observations taken with telescopes on Earth. So something had to be done to match expectations with what was coming back from Mariner.

JPL used crayons.

Technicians took the Mariner photos and filled in the colors, mostly with tan and brown crayons, and then presented them to Pickering. “He was happy with that,” remembered Arv Kliore. “In fact, one of the shots was framed and hung outside his door for months.”

Better yet, Pickering made the cover of Time magazine again, this time in the July 1965 issue, which coincided with Mariner 4’s flyby of Mars.27 Still, the photographic results from the mission were a big letdown. “It was a terrific disappointment for the scientists and the public,” said Tom Krimigis. “Now, Mars wasn’t like in the H. G. Wells novel, no people, no canals.”

The big concern among the members of Mariner’s mission management team was the reaction in Congress. The absence of mind-boggling results might dampen interest in funding future missions to Mars, and perhaps the other planets. The worry turned out to be largely unfounded. Six more Mariner spacecraft would be built and launched to study Venus and Mercury, and to return to study the cratered surface of Mars.

There was, however, another controversy connected to the mission of Mariner 4. When the U.S.-built spacecraft made its journey to the planet Mars, it wasn’t alone.

Excerpt from "Trailblazing Mars: NASA's Next Giant Leap." (c) 2010 Pat Duggins