The first space craft pictures of Mars were the work of a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology led by Dr. Robert Leighton (center) and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory led by Denton Allen (glasses).

The program describes some of the mysteries of Mars and the planning of the television camera system for Mariner IV that helped some of those mysteries. Denton Allen’s team is shown developing the highly complex system that could weigh only 11 pounds and consume only 10 watts of current. It had to record the images of the Martian surface, encode the information, store it, and then send it back through the 135,000,000 miles of space to earth.

The team is on hand to watch the first numbers come from the computer printer as the pictures are decoded. Dr. Leighton explains the scientific significance of the first rough pictures of the surface of Mars.