As the very first close-up image of another planet beamed to Earth on July 15, 1965, the engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory couldn't wait to see it.
This was Mariner 4, the first spacecraft to photograph the surface of Mars. At the time, it was the farthest any human-made object had ever traveled.
But the computers were going to take eight hours to process a single image before the excited scientists could get a glimpse.
So engineer Richard Grumm had the idea that they should print out the data as it came in from a tape recorder receiving the signal from the spacecraft — and the engineers colored the first image by hand. Dan Goods, a visual strategist at JPL, retold this incredible story on his blog, Directed Play.
Here's how it happened:
The engineers printed out the series of ticker tape strips of paper with numbers on them indicating how bright each pixel of the first image was going to be, and put them on the wall.
Goods wrote that Grumm picked up some pastels from a nearby art store, and chose the most perfect color palette imaginable — especially considering the final image was going to arrive in black and white.
"It is uncanny how close his color scheme is to the actual colors of Mars. It's as if they came right out of current images of the planet," Goods wrote. "I've seen some of the other color schemes he tried and it could have been green or purple!"
See the rest of the story at Business Insider