Plot

An elderly man living in obscurity in the suburbs of Los Angeles tells the story of when, in the summer of 1965, he inadvertently produced the world's first up-close image of another planet the world had ever seen.

In 1965, the first images of Mars were sent to Earth as a series of numbers that indicated the brightness of a single pixel. It was supposed to take more than 8 hours to receive all the pixels needed for a complete image. But one tape recorder engineer on the Mariner IV mission figured out a short cut and accidentally created the first picture of the Red planet.—L.A. Times