The first photograph taken from the surface of Mars (1976) | Hacker News Reader

The first photograph taken from the surface of Mars (1976)

nasa.gov

75 pointsgw581510 comments

Open articleView on HN

Also really cool are the first pictures from Venus from the USSR Venera missions: http://www.space.com/18551-venera-13.html

The environmental challenge here was of course far greater than for Mars.

I am old enough to remember watching come in live on TV. It was painfully slow in those days: They showed the image build up scanline by scanline over tens of minutes. I forget which TV station had the patience to do this. Wouldnt happen nowadays.

There's no shortage of willingness to cover excruciatingly boring stories, as long as a "Breaking News" label can be slapped on it. I'm talking about live feeds from closed doors, behind which someone may or may not be having an important conversation, which may or may not conclude in the near future, and when it does, that person may or may not exit through this door. So why not a slowly appearing picture from another planet?

They'll probably run it split screen along with a panel of bickering "analysts", though.

The technology used to record images from these early landings is quite interesting as well. It's pretty exotic if all you're used to are modern CCD sensors.

More on Viking Lander Camera System:

http://pdsimage.wr.usgs.gov/cdroms/Viking_Lander/vl_0001/doc...

Details about Soviet space cameras:

http://mentallandscape.com/V_Cameras.htm

First image of Mars ever taken from the surface of Mars — yes.

The first image from Mars (although from all accounts not actually a successful picture of the martian surface) goes to the 70 scan lines that poor old Mars-3 sent in 1971 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3#Entry.2C_descent.2C_lan...

Viking 1 Orbiter, Photo No. AC85-0760-4 -- Early morning clouds in Noctis Labyrinthus on the Planet Mars. Condensate clouds are seen here in early morning in the canyons of Labyrinthus Noctis, which lies at the western end of the equatorial Valles Marineris system.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/images/content/73476main_Ma...

and

Viking II's photo of Water Ice on Utopia Planitia " This high-resolution color photo of the surface of Mars was taken by Viking Lander 2 at its Utopia Planitia landing site on May 18, 1979, and relayed to Earth by Orbiter 1 on June 7. It shows a thin coating of water ice on the rocks and soil. "

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00571

It's mind-boggling to me the effort it must have taken to get to Mars and send back photographs with the technology available in the 1970's. We're walking around with more computing power in our pocket than was probably available to all of NASA back then!

I love the Viking missions.

Also, the first images from the surface of Venus:

http://www.unbelievable-facts.com/2013/08/the-soviets-landed...

The Avaneya project created software to decode the Viking Lander tapes. A few tapes contain images that were (as far as I know) never released. Beautiful results: https://gist.github.com/jakeogh/fa995a3277d500ab59b1

https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Avaneya:_Viking_Lander_Remast...

That's engineering. They had nothing compared to what we have today, and they got it done. Love it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com