File:Mars Viking 12a001first.png

Summary

First image from the Viking 1 lander, taken only a few minutes after the landing. Engineers decided to program the probe to quickly take and send an image of a footpad (in this case footpad number 3) because it was feared that earlier Soviet probes, which stopped transmitting shortly after touchdown, may have sank into quicksand. If Viking 1 met the same fate, they wanted to know about it this time. Some speculate that the cloudiness on the left side is due to dust left over from the landing. The cameras scanned one vertical strip at a time such that by the time the scanning moved to the center of the image, the dust had allegedly settled. The large rock near the center is about 10 cm across.

Date 2007-07-10; original photo was taken 1976-07-20. Source Own work based on an image in the NASA Viking image archive and File:First photograph ever taken from the surface of Mars.jpg Author "Roel van der Hoorn (Van der Hoorn)" Permission (Reusing this file) I used the original 12a001.bb1 image from the NASA Viking image archive, converted it to .png, manually removed the noise and finally increased the brightness and contrast by 20. Except for the conversion, this was all done in Adobe Photoshop CS2. The original file by NASA is in the public domain, and so is this new one.

Other versions I created this image as a replacement for the now deleted image Mars first lander image.gif. This file was created by NASA, but the quality was not very high. Using the original picture from the Lander archive resulted in a higher quality image.

Licensing

Public domain images are available for anybody to use without any licenses, royalties, or special permissions.