Events

The Pastel from Mars

In July of 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 spacecraft made a historic flyby of Mars, capturing the first photographs ever sent back to Earth from another planet. The image data was transmitted to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where it slowly trickled out as a series of numbers on long strips of paper. The engineers at JPL, knowing that it was going to take over twelve hours for even just the first image to be transmitted, didn’t want to wait that long. Breathlessly awaiting the first glimpse of a planet that was still an almost total mystery to science, they stapled the numerical strips to the wall, bought a box of pastels from a local art store, and rendered the image by hand, color-by-number style. It’s hard to imagine a more unexpected work of art. The first robotic image of an alien world comes into being in pastel—a medium most closely associated with eighteenth-century French portraiture. But perhaps this eccentric pastel drawing can help us look differently at both the past and future of space imaging, especially since, in its dusty, transient materiality, it preserves certain forms of knowledge that were discarded in the photographs that were eventually released by NASA. Moreover, in many but not all respects, the 1965 Mars images are precedents for the black hole images that would be made at the BHI more than fifty years later. What might we learn by comparing them?

Zoom

Monday, March 2, 2026 11:00 AM

Inperson
BHI Conference Room and Zoom