In 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 probe executed its historic flyby of Mars, capturing the first images ever sent back to Earth from another planet. The numerical image data was transmitted to teletype machines at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, but it would take hours for the computers to convert the data into viewable television images. The engineers at JPL didn’t want to wait that long, so they stapled the 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 an image more thoroughly beset by anachronism. A first glimpse of an alien world, enabled by advanced twentieth-century technology, comes into being in pastel—a medium most closely associated with eighteenth-century French portraiture. But perhaps this eccentric pastel drawing, in its very anachronism, can teach us to look anew at the project of visual representation both on- and off-Earth. 

Summary

By Kirstin Ohrt

Jennifer Roberts took art history off the surface of the earth in the James F. Haley ’50 Memorial Lecture on Wednesday titled “The Pastel from Mars.” Her subject was a pastel work completed by NASA engineers in 1965. These unlikely artists were awaiting 25 renderings of the surface of Mars from the historic Mariner 4 probe space mission. In the eight-and-one-half hours of suspense, while data transmitted from Mariner 4 was computed into images, these engineers printed and collaged together the binary code and brought about the first image of Mars in a color-by-number schematic. Though they had intended to use chalk, the clerk at the craft store up-sold them on Rembrandt color pastels given the gravity of the task—and so the image came into being in yellows, reds, oranges, and browns.

Whereas the scientific community doesn’t assign the pastel work much importance (it recently made its way out of complete obscurity and into a stairwell), it was, in fact, the first image to be televised to the world. Given the impossibility of our seeing Mars, or any extraterrestrial image, in the way that we see the world around us, Roberts suggests that pastel was the ideal medium for transmitting this image—surpassing the misrepresentation as evidence of the computer’s rendering. Pastel pigment hovers on paper in nebulous particles, imprecise and evanescent, reflecting a closer truth in the case of unseeable subject matter. Even its ingredients, ground marine fossils, align with the composition of Mars’s surface, which once held water.

Addressing the possibility of past or existing life forms in space, Roberts pointed to the need for humanists to join scientists in their endeavor for discovery to forego the old frontier narratives of colonization and extraction. Rather than consider the pastel rendering frivolous per the scientific perspective, we should see it as foresighted and recognize the importance of giving humanists and art historians seats at the table. Ultimately, the four impatient NASA engineers produced the “Marsiest” image possible in their haste, long before the computer produced its misleadingly lifeless space-scapes; according to Roberts, “NASA got it right on the first try.”