Nasa accused of painting Mars red

Telegraph ^ | 29 Jan 2004 | Robert Uhlig

[demlosers]

The American space agency Nasa has been accused of doctoring its pictures of Mars to make the Martian surface conform to our impression of the famously red planet.

Nasa has been accused of digitally "tweaking" drab brown scenery to make it redder. It has even been suggested that Nasa removed green patches to hide evidence of life.

The theories gained credence after Nasa told New Scientist that "getting the colours right is a surprisingly difficult and subjective job", the magazine reports today.

Most of the pictures have been taken through green, blue and infra-red filters - instead of green, blue and standard red filters, which would have produced more accurate colours.

Dr Jim Bell, who worked with Nasa on the Mars rovers' cameras, said infrared filters were used because they helped geologists to distinguish rock types.

In reality, Mars appears red largely because of the dust in its atmosphere.

[Rosencrantz]

Also some information here: http://www.libertythink.com/totalinformation/BlueMars.htm

[Rosencrantz]

[tet68]

On mars?
Are you sure this isn't a micrograph of a sample taken from
Hillery!'s Pantsuit,"ole crusty"?

[perfect stranger]

I have always wondered why he made that poor choice of words. Using "sexed-up" instead of "exaggerated" shows many things about this moron, and none of them are good.

[mtg]

Somebody needs to be fired!

[Nick Danger]

[Wolfstar]

Uh oh, Richard C. [for Certifiable] Hoagland will about bust a gut jumping on this case. He already claims to have spotted old manufactured equipment in pics taken by the Spirit rover.

[Wolfstar]

Richard C. Hoagland and Art Bell have an answer for every such question.

[Yeti]

I checked the site, I get a vague impression that if it IS life, it might be the remnants of some kind of coral or something like that.

[BlueNgold]

I dunno. Maybe its a Fab 5 conspiracy! The horizon looks pretty pink to me ....

[Yeti]

BTW: glad the rumors about you were wrong!

[reagan_fanatic]

"The second shooter on the grassy knoll did it..."

I thought it might have been the sniper hiding in the storm sewer grate or possibly the Babushka Lady.

[KangarooJacqui]

One of the famous Viking pictures had a blue sky for years. It wasn't accurate, but it did look natural.

Interesting you should mention that. It reminds me of a story my father, who was a NASA technician in the late sixties/early-to-mid seventies, told me.

Apparently during the first Mars missions, they were getting the camera footage and someone saw the sky was pink. As an earthling would, they adjusted it to blue. But then the camera panned past one of the legs of the craft, which had some sort of band around it of a certain colour. With the colour adjustment they'd made, the colour of the band was wrong. So they adjusted it again...

And hence, the story of how NASA found out that the sky was pink on Mars.


Of course, parts of this story may be slightly inaccurate... I'm remembering this from years ago (I didn't get read fairy stories as a kid, I got told NASA stories instead. Heh.)

[Proud_texan]

Paint Your Wagon?

Ouch! (sorry!)

[PAR35]

"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."

I would start by pasting a calibrated color wheel on the side of the lander. That way at least your blue NASA logo wouldn't appear to be red.

[KangarooJacqui]

See post 93. Question answered, from the horse's mouth as it were.

(not that I'm calling my dad a horse... erm... let's not continue with that line of thought)

[tacticalogic]

He already claims to have spotted old manufactured equipment in pics taken by the Spirit rover.

Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulators?

[Lazamataz]

One of the famous Viking pictures had a blue sky for years.

Looks more purple to me.

[Don Joe]

That guy is certifiable. He's got heavily pixelated images, and insists that the pixels -- and jpeg artifacts -- are buildings. Millions and millions of buildings, all perfectly aligned with pixel spacing, in pixel orientation (i.e., none of them are at all askew to the image frame), in pixel *size* -- but, they're not pixels, they're a city.

If anyone ever asks for proof that the Rorschach test works, send them to that site.

[BobS]

"Nasa accused of painting Mars red"

Shouldn't a Republican planet be red? Pluto is blue, right?