14 DAY TRIAL // Engineers with Cartesian Theatre are pleased to announce that they were recently able to successfully recover the vast majority of the first photographs ever captured on the surface of Mars. The information was collected via the Viking mission, at the time one of NASA's most ambitious space projects to date.
The Viking probes were the first to land on, and image, the surface of the Red Planet, back in the mid-1970s. The raw mission data the spacecraft sent back were originally stored on magnetic tapes, and later transferred in the public domain, in 1995. Numerous CDs were inscribed with these images.
However, the proprietary technology NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) use to read the data had been abandoned for decades. This is where the new software developed at Cartesian Theatre came in handy. With this powerful tool, the Viking images can once again be accessed.
The program, called Avaneya: Viking Lander Remastered (VLR), is a tool that can run on most home computers, and which features a simple interface. However, its powerful processing engine allowed the recovery of the 14-gigabyte image database, as well as its return in the public domain.