A few years ago, I ran across a copy of NASA Special Publication 441, Viking Orbiter Views of Mars, at the Prairie Archives in Springfield, IL. This book was originally published in 1978 to highlight the discoveries that the Viking program was in the process of making. As I flipped through the pages, I saw hundreds of spectacular images ranging from birds’ eye views of the entire planet, to the weather, and to the seasonal heartbeat of the polar ice caps. And I wondered to myself – why hadn’t many of these images been reprocessed? They were fuzzy, grainy and oversaturated. Mosaics, painstakingly and lovingly constructed with paper and scissors, showed seams that often made interpretation of details difficult. These were postcards from the Solar System – a tourist’s idea of what other planets were like, but clearly not the experience of being there.

I am fond of the Viking missions. Their orbits took them far above Mars (as far as 56,000 kilometers from the surface), giving them the ability to take sweeping images of entire hemispheres. Modern missions mostly don’t stray so far from Mars’ surface, and can’t fully capture the same sweeping vistas captured by the Viking Orbiters. (Mars Express, which rises a little over 10,000 km from the surface at the highest point in its orbit, can come close, but only Mars Orbiter Mission occasionally gets full-disk views in high resolution.) Also, as reconnaissance spacecraft, the Viking orbiters were designed to study the broader weather and climatological patterns of the Martian atmosphere in a way that the close-up imaging provided by current missions can’t match.

In a way, Viking images are refreshing. They don’t show the topographies of a dead world, but a planet with active weather (even if that weather is tame in comparison to Earth’s). And so, I decided to work on bringing the images in Viking Orbiter Views of Mars into the digital age. I began with the raw data archived by NASA and used Photoshop to rescue some of the beautiful images from obscurity. After a few years of working with Viking imagery, it’s stunning to see how well the analog tube cameras still compare to the digital cameras that modern spacecraft are equipped with. Here’s some of what I’ve found: