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Description
English: First Clear Image From Mars Surface ( Viking 1, July 20, 1976).

This is the first "clear" image ever transmitted from the surface of Mars. The Viking 1 image was 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.

NOTE: See File:Mars 3 Image.png for the first "actual" image transmitted from Mars - Mars 3 lander ( Soviet Union), December 2, 1971 - the Mars 3 image, however, was unclear and contained "nothing identifiable" according to the Soviet Academy of Sciences ( ref).
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 This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Van der Hoorn at English Wikipedia. This applies worldwide.
In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so:
Van der Hoorn grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

The image is based on an original image from NASA to which the following copyright statement is applicable:

Public domain This file is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". (See Template:PD-USGov, NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy.)
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Date/TimeThumbnailDimensionsUserComment
current 12:02, 23 January 2009 Thumbnail for version as of 12:02, 23 January 20091,438 × 512 (299 KB)Van der Hoorn
21:29, 10 July 2007 Thumbnail for version as of 21:29, 10 July 20071,438 × 512 (316 KB)Van der Hoorn== Summary == {{Information |Description = This is the first image ever transmitted from the surface of Mars. It was taken only a few minutes after landing. Engineers decided to program the probe to quickly take and send an image of a footpad because it w
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