The Solar System in 50 years

When Mariner 4 reached Mars in July 1965 it was mankind's first visit to another planet. By an incredible coincidence (surely..?), New Horizons whizzed by Pluto 50 years after Mariner 4 whizzed by Mars. In half a century, we've went through all the "old" nine planets.

Bonus 1: When the first hires photos of Pluto arrived, they were instantly uploaded on the web, on Twitter, Instagram et al. When the first "hires" (sort of) photo of Mars arrived, it was drawn by hand.

PASADENA, July 17 — The pictures of Mars are being sent to earth from Mariner 4 as a steady stream of numbers. Initially they are in binary code, but they are printed out on paper tape in ordinary numerals.

Each line on the printed sample represents one dot in the picture, which itself consists of 200 rows of 200 dots. In a given line the first three numerals designate the number of the row in the picture.

The middle column represents the shading of the dot on a scale that runs from 000 for pure white to 063 for pure black. [Six bits grayscale]

Finally there is a six numeral group representing the time of receipt on earth in Greenwich Mean Time. For example, 233752 means that transmission came in at 23 hours 37 minutes and 52 seconds, or 11:37:52 P.M.

- "Mariner's Mars Photos Come In as Numbers", New York Times July 18 1965

What to do with all those numbers?

So Richard Grumm and his fellow mission managers came upon the idea of printing out the brightness values onto vertical strips, taping them up on the office divider, and coloring each number in with pastels. Thus it was that the world's first transmitted, televised image of Mars was drawn by hand.

- Greg Allen: Pastel By Numbers, greg.org May 26, 2009

Bonus 2: By another coincidence (..?), the JPL Director at the time was named William Pickering (1910-2004). He has, as far as is known, no connection whatsoever with William H. Pickering (1858-1938), an American astronomer who worked with Percival Lowell and calculated with a slew of transneptunian planets, the most massive of which supposedly had 20,000 times the mass of Earth.

Bonus 3: When NASA planned for the '65 #MarsFlyby and the precious, historical photos they could take, they used the map above. Yes, it really features the infamous canals; the ones "discovered" by Giovanni Schiaparelli, and intensely studied by Percival Lowell. Lowell was, of course, the man who supposedly calculated about a certain Planet X (correct) which turned out to be Pluto (incorrect, since Pluto eventually turned out to be far too light). Lowell is possibly immortalized in the "PL" of the name of the (now) dwarf planet and it's symbol.