Nasa accused of painting Mars red

Telegraph ^ | 29 Jan 2004 | Robert Uhlig

[JoJo Gunn]

I understand the need to look at things through infrared or UV filters, etc. But for the rover and landscape images for usual public consumption calibrate the cameras to the color charts mounted on the landers and let 'er rip. Just an old curmudgeons two cents....

[non-anonymous]

This is the color calibration target. The problem with early images is that they haven't used the red filter (L4), so they approximate it with images using the infrared filter (L2). As soon as they get panoramas with full red, green, and blue (L4, L5, & L6), they should have it without a doubt.

[gcruse]

Anyone who's done serious color work knows this to be absolutely true, even on this planet. I can imagine how hard it must be to get it right on Mars with no close up human eye reference to go off of.

That's why they send up a grey scale and/or color chart.  Match the color of the scale in the picture to the one you have in the lab, and the other scene colors will drop into range.  Differences in the light color used to view each comes into play, but not to a large degree.  But if you are shooting through an infrared rather than a red filter...that's a horse of, ahem, a different color.

[Truth666]

NASA's Tinfoil long tradition

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/history/apollo/images/670800.GIF

[ravingnutter]

I also heard that they did not tell us about the bones they found when we landed on the moon...

...the cow didn't make it, LOL!

[Prime Choice]

Stoppit...yer makin' me homesick... ; )

[Redcloak]

Hmmm indeed...

[sweetliberty]

"what purpose does it serve to supress greenery on Mars?"

Well, we have to hide it if there is life there so the democRATs won't be upset when the president and Halleburton start drilling for oil and endangring native species.

[COBOL2Java]

Looks like the Rover parallel parks as well as my daughter! :0)

[sweetliberty]

"I have my tinfoil helmet on and I don't see any red."

You can't use the generic ones. Such image study requires one of the highly specialized types of tinfoil hat.

.

[Simmy2.5]

Hoagland is certainly getting around, and he certainly has a following. Especially when NASA has to respond one of his, as well as his fellow tin foil hat friends nutty ideas. Expect Hoagland to appear on Coast to Coast to talk about the latest NASA "cover-up" and how he is making an impression in trying to "expose the truth". :-P

[DeepDish]

Just make sure the insurance is paid up. Finding her a wealthy husband is the only way out.

[Don Joe]

Anyone who's done serious color work knows this to be absolutely true, even on this planet. I can imagine how hard it must be to get it right on Mars with no close up human eye reference to go off of.

They took something roughly akin to a Macbeth target (very roughly) for calibration. Regardless of how things "really look" on mars, I've found with my own color balance twiddling (from the first rover) that when you balance the images to something roughly equivalent to "earth light", you get a much better view of what's there. Things (rocks, etc.) that were previously faintly different shades of red suddenly become very visually... better. You can see shades, different colors. Things look much better. IMO it's not "cheating", it's just a way to look at the rocks and see them the way they'd appear if they were brought back to earth.

[DonQ]

There may be "tweaking" but I would think it is benign. It must be remembered that Mars is considerably farther from the sun and has virtually no surface water that could reflect sunlight reaching the planet's surface. This means that the view of Mars is, at its best, considerably darker than what we are accustomed to seeing on earth; kinda like dusk for most of American landscapes.

To make the pictures at all appealing or useful to non-experts, it is necessary to boost the F stops on the camera so it is almost acting as one of those night-vision devices. This necessarily changes the colors that show up on the boosted image.

[adaven]

In all fairness, here is a pic from a NASA/JPL news conference. Look at the Mars pic (with blue sky) on the screen behind the people:

The same publicly released image did not have blue skies, it was very red.

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

What a load of BS we never landed on the moon either ! Its really made of cheezzzzzzzz

[King Prout]

If the rover is in Death Valley, why do they have to use a radio link to repair it?

all part of the smoke-and-mirrors required to keep the sheeple duped.
y'see, NASA actually almost killed the actors they had pretending to be astronauts on Apollo 13, but they wussed out in the end and re-wrote the script so that they'd manage to cobble together some Roddenberry-esque rubegoldbergian CO2 filter and "make it home alive".

It was all a hoax, I tell you.

< /tinfoil >

[King Prout]

ok, a literal LOL!

[Yeti]

Subjectivity can be reduced but not eliminated altogether.

Maybe not, but subjectivity can be accounted for, long before the probe gets to Mars, by using a reliable reference, and making the descisions about mapping pixel values to colors before the cam is ever mounted on the rover. The reference needs to be shielded from the environment(enclosed), so that you don't wind up filtering out the color of the light on mars. The calibration needs to be identical everywhere you go.

By doing something like that, hundreds of people can contribute to the coloration descisions in a carefully controlled way. Then, when it's critical, it will be fully automatic and reliable, and we can be assured that the pictures taken during that session are rendered as a very close representation of what we would see if we were there, looking through our own eyes.

For example, if they had something like this painted inside the camera housing, with a reliable light inside:

Then just map it so that that image produces known values (on average) in the right pixels.

[Rosencrantz]

Life??



more at: http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/