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 thepictures are
decoded.

Dr. Leighton explains the
scientific significance of the
first rough pictures of the
surface of Mars.