Frederic C. Billingsley

Frederic Crockett Billingsley (23 July 1921 – 31 May 2002) was an American engineer, who spent most of his career developing techniques for digital image processing in support of American space probes to the moon, to Mars, and to other planets.

He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and died in Great Falls, Montana.

No suitable commercial hardware existed, so JPL's Fred Billingsley designed a system called the Video Film Converter (VFC).

Built for JPL by Link General Precision, the VFC was used in the 1970s for image playback of the striking pictures returned by the planetary missions of the unmanned Mariner spacecraft.

The JPL document "Overview of VICAR"[3] shows that Billingsley did software as well as hardware: The VICAR image processing language was defined by JPL employees Stan Bressler, Howard Frieden and Fred Billingsley, and implemented in 1966 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to process image data produced by the planetary exploration program.