Skip to main content
TOP STORY: NASA Is Not Altering Mars Colors.: Mars Spirit Rover Picture analysis.

In this thread I will attempt to summarise my posts to the larger thread.

What are you talking about?

Ok, the initial alarm was raised after it was noticed that the color-calibration sundial mounted on the rover, looked quite markedly different in the Mars-Panorama shots compared to its regular appearance.



Immediately wide-ranging theories began to pop up. At this stage I knew very little of the particulars of the PanCam so I decided to go and see what the Horses mouth had to say. I sent out a swag of emails to the NASA marsrover team, the Athena Instrument team at Cornell University, and the long shot, an email to Assoc. Professor James Bell. Who is the Pancam Payload Element Lead for the mission.

Now, getting no response from the Athena team, and an automated response from the NASA team. I was amazed and delighted to see that Dr. Bell had indeed taken the time out of his busy schedule to help explain this quirk in the panorama pictures. His email response is below:
quote:Thanks for writing. The answer is that the color chips on the sundial have different colors in the near-infrared range of Pancam filters. For example, the blue chip is dark near 600 nm, where humans see red light, but is especially bright at 750 nm, which is used as 'red' for many Pancam images. So it appears pink in RGB composites. We chose the pigments for the chips on purpose this way, so they could provide different patterns of brightnesses regardless of which filters we used. The details of the colors of the pigments are published in a paper I wrote in the December issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research (Planets), in case you want more details...


All of us tired folks on the team are really happy that so many people around the world are following the mission and sending their support and encouragement...


Thanks,


Jim Bell
Cornell U.

Now, as far as the pink tab where the blue one should be, that email is infact the complete answer. But its not easily understandable to the layman. Below I will attempt to explain why this occurs.............

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

georgelazenby: Rusomaniacal batshittery

Яџѕѕіаиѕ. Yes, I know that spells Ytdzdziais, don't bother me with details. If Тетяіѕ can do it, I can too. "We went up a short incline. This brought us to an ordinary glass door. We knocked. We waited. We waited. We noticed the doorbell. We rang. We waited. Eventually we grew bold and entered. This brought us into a narrow hallway that had all the indications of being nothing more than drywall, veneer and ceiling tile. We said 'Hello....?' No one answered our question. We proceeded down the hallway flanked by doors, unsure as to whether the desire not to surprise someone for the sake of politeness overrode the rudeness of opening a closed door. At an impasse, we kept walking down the hallway, not opening any doors. But, we rapidly became trapped, when we realized that the only way out of this hallway was to open a door. Because it seemed the least likely to be the entrance to an office, bathroom or weird eastern European slave dungeon, we chose the last door the h...
Post a Comment
Read more

New York Post Online Edition

news : "December 29, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Startling new Army statistics show that strife-torn Baghdad - considered the most dangerous city in the world - now has a lower murder rate than New York. The newest numbers, released by the Army's 1st Infantry Division, reveal that over the past three months, murders and other crimes in Baghdad are decreasing dramatically and that in the month of October, there were fewer murders per capita there than the Big Apple, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The Bush administration and outside experts are touting these new figures as a sign that, eight months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, major progress is starting to be made in the oft-criticized effort by the United States and coalition partners to restore order and rebuild Iraq. 'If these numbers are accurate, they show that the systems we put in place four months ago to develop a police force based on the principles of a free and democratic society are starting to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Josh Nimoy @ ITP - BallDroppings

Josh Nimoy @ ITP - BallDroppings : "BallDroppings is an addicting and noisy play-toy. It can also be seen as an emergence game. My brother Marc takes this software seriously as an audio-visual performance instrument. Balls fall from the top of the screen and bounce off the lines you are drawing with the mouse. The balls make a percussive and melodic sound, whose pitch depends on how fast the ball is moving when it hits the line."
Post a Comment
Read more