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Lot 84
[Mariner IV] FIRST PHOTOGRAPH OF MARS: the finest in the series of the first 21 close-up photographs ever captured of Mars NASA, 15 July 1965
14 – 28 April 2025, 12:00 CEST
Paris, Avenue HocheSold for €832 inc. premium
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[Mariner IV] FIRST PHOTOGRAPH OF MARS: the finest in the series of the first 21 close-up photographs ever captured of Mars
NASA, 15 July 1965
Printed 1965.
Vintage gelatin silver print on fibre-based paper [NASA image 65-H-1236].
With NASA caption numbered "65-H-1236" on the reverse (issued by NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.).
20.3 x 25.4 cm. (8 x 10 in.)
Historical context
The Mariner IV spacecraft, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), captured the first images of another planet ever returned from deep space. The photographs were taken by a television camera nearly 150 million miles from Earth—farther than any camera had ever travelled before. Photograph No. 11, the mission's most detailed image, featured the Atlantis Basin between Mare Sirenum and Mare Cimmeria, with a 96-mile-wide crater at its centre later named "Mariner" to honour the spacecraft.
"Confirming our loneliness, at least in the solar system, the scarred landscape caused us to cherish all the more intensely the luxuriant, sweetly habitable globe we live on" wrote American writer William Styron.
(Schick and Van Haaften, foreword, p. 6)
Printed 1965.
Vintage gelatin silver print on fibre-based paper [NASA image 65-H-1236].
With NASA caption numbered "65-H-1236" on the reverse (issued by NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.).
20.3 x 25.4 cm. (8 x 10 in.)
Historical context
The Mariner IV spacecraft, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), captured the first images of another planet ever returned from deep space. The photographs were taken by a television camera nearly 150 million miles from Earth—farther than any camera had ever travelled before. Photograph No. 11, the mission's most detailed image, featured the Atlantis Basin between Mare Sirenum and Mare Cimmeria, with a 96-mile-wide crater at its centre later named "Mariner" to honour the spacecraft.
"Confirming our loneliness, at least in the solar system, the scarred landscape caused us to cherish all the more intensely the luxuriant, sweetly habitable globe we live on" wrote American writer William Styron.
(Schick and Van Haaften, foreword, p. 6)
Footnotes
After a 7 1/2-month interplanetary journey, Mariner IV flew within 9,847 kilometres of Mars on July 15, 1965. Each image, composed of 240,000 bits of data, took over 8 hours to transmit back to Earth. The spacecraft's camera, with its shutter operating every 48 seconds and alternating red and green filters, captured 21 complete images and part of another. These groundbreaking pictures provided humanity its first unhindered view of Mars, described by Dr. Robert Jastrow as no longer "straining to see through the Earth's atmosphere like a driver peering through a rain-spattered windshield" (Cortright, p. 130).
The images revealed a discontinuous swath of the Martian surface, covering about 1% of the planet, from 40° N, 170° E to 50° S, 255° E.
"The historic value of these photos is clear. Their scientific value lies primarily in their indication of the existence of clouds and their demonstration of the importance and feasibility of imagery as a scientific tool for planetary exploration. Many scientists before that time had considered the surface of Mars to resemble more closely that of the Earth than that of the Moon. These pictures, portending a complete rearrangement of Mars on the family tree of the solar system, must be regarded as one of the high points of discovery of the space age, if not of the 20th century. Because of the speed with which photographic data can be disseminated, and the universal understanding of pictures, the entire world truly shared in the excitement of this discovery."
— Bruce Murray, California Institute of Technology (Cortright, p. 131)
Literature
LIFE, 6 August 1965, pp. 60-61
TIME, 6 August 1965, p. 58
Chaikin, Space: a history of space exploration through photographs, p. 62
Exploring space with a camera, Cortright, p. 130
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