Joseph Horton
Both Shadow and Substance In 1965, a NASA satellite named ‘Mariner 4’ weighing half a ton captured 21 photographs of the planet Mars. These became the first detailed images of another planet within our solar system that was not our own and changed the way we saw our solar system forever.
(July 15, 1965, NASA/JPL-Caltech) This is the first close-up image ever taken of Mars. This shows an area about 205 miles (330 km) across by 746 miles (1200 km) from the edge to the bottom of the frame. The area is near the boundary of Elysium Planitia to the west and Arcadia Planitia to the east. The hazy area barely visible above the limb on the left side of the image may be clouds.
As a species, we have since landed 10 successful unmanned spacecraft on the surface of the Red Planet; beginning with ‘Viking 1’ in 1976, which marked the beginning of a new visual perspective that would allow us to be positioned at the planet’s surface. Introducing a world that looks so familiar, yet incomprehensible in its position from us. With a minimum distance of 33.9 million miles, this tiny red dot in our night sky had now become a tangible and relatable space, solely through the capturing of a photograph. These first images sent back to Earth by the ‘Viking 1’ mission on July 20th, 1976, revealed the planet’s surface in a black and white photograph of the rovers immediate ground space. From this, we had a detailed picture of what the planet’s geology looked like, just as if we too could look down at our feet and observe the soil around us. The ability of the rovers’ cameras to democratise the planet is one of the reasons we have been able to become so invested in this space, with their lenses acting as an extension of ourselves. This new extra-terrestrial window transporting us to the Martian landscape, in the way only the photograph can do, and then presenting us with a space that blurs the lines between the figurative and the real.
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