First Mars Image
One of the earliest images from Mars comes from this strange picture from the Mariner 4 mission in 1964. Too anxious to wait for the official processed shot from the spacecraft, engineers at JPL simply converted the image data into integers and then hand colored it in like a paint-by-numbers drawing.
Mariner 4 transmitted the first close-up pictures of another planet to Earth and revealed Mars to be a dry, desert-like world very unlike our own.
Image: NASA/JPL/Dan Goods