Television Photography
This experiment consisted of a 2-in. vidicon television camera which transmitted photography from Mars. It was a photometrically calibrated instrument providing overlapping, selectively filtered, low-resolution pictures and broadband (unfiltered) high-resolution pictures, each nested in a low-resolution overlap. Both types of pictures had approximately a 700- by 380-element format, and an order-of-magnitude difference in resolution between them. Resolution of 500 m/TV line and 50 m/TV line resulted from low (11 deg by 14 deg) and high (1.1 deg by 1.4 deg) resolution pictures taken at a periapsis altitude of 2000 km. The official ordering system of identification of pictures was by a 9-digit number called Data Automation Set (DAS) which is chronological and a kind of time. More than 7,300 pictures of the Martian surface, the Martian satellites, Saturn, and star fields were acquired during the mission. A variety of picture enhancement techniques had been applied to the original data resulting in more than 30,000 photographs being available through NSSDC. These different versions of the original imagery were processed using the Mission Test Video System (MTVS) and the Image Processing Laboratory (IPL) at JPL.