The Mars Viking Lander Experimental Data Record: an Examination of Digital and Analogue Image Objects Within a Museum of Photography Collection

Using a set of photographic print rolls containing over 4,000 image frames of the Martian landscape produced by NASA from images obtained by cameras mounted on the Viking Lander I and II spacecraft in 1976, and a companion CD-ROM set containing replicates of Viking’s visual data, this thesis will explore the photographic technologies and the image processing procedures used to create NASA image products for scientific research. It will also examine the relationship between the photographic rolls and the original digital entities on the CD-ROMs and explore why such science-based photographic objects should be collected by a museum of photography.