Uploaded November 2022 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
The first colored image of another planet taken from space was hand drawn with crayons.
Have you ever colored one of those color-by-number drawings? Well that’s actually how we got to see the first, close up image of another planet.
It was July 15, 1965, and NASA’s Mariner-4 spacecraft flew past Mars to take the first ever colored photograph of the planet from space- but the older computers of the time were going to take several hours to produce the digital image. So engineers at JPL printed out the raw data as numbers on strips of paper and colored in the numbers with crayons, becoming the first colored image of another planet taken from space.
The first colored image of another planet taken from space was hand drawn with crayons.
Have you ever colored one of those color-by-number drawings? Well that’s actually how we got to see the first, close up image of another planet.
It was July 15, 1965, and NASA’s Mariner-4 spacecraft flew past Mars to take the first ever colored photograph of the planet from space- but the older computers of the time were going to take several hours to produce the digital image. So engineers at JPL printed out the raw data as numbers on strips of paper and colored in the numbers with crayons, becoming the first colored image of another planet taken from space.
