New Mars Forums

They already are.  Go and do the science yourself - get to the PDS MER Workbook, get the raw data and make the images yourself like I did just there. It's not hard - infact it's very easy indeed. If you're disagreeing with those colour - then you're aledging an enormous conspiracy dealing with hundreds of scientists both within nasa, and outside nasa - a concept no more valid than suggesting we never walked on the moon. It's that clear.

No one suggests mars is 'blood red' - no one hassaid "here's a true colour picture of mars - and it's bood red"

Butterscotch - thats all it's about.

Mars is that colour. Thats how it is. The greatest brightest minds in the world have studied this and come up with the same answer.

There is no cover up. There is no tweaking, adjusting, fixing, tinting. To suggest there is is beyond ignorant.

Jim's a damn good chap and at can be made. Perhaps when MASTCam gets to mars with MSl - the colour imager there will perhaps halt a little of the nonsense - but i doubt it.

Sorry to sound a bit ranty and offensive about this - but things like this REALLY annoy me. There's a lot of things that NASA does wrong - very wrong - but making false claims about the colour of mars is NOT one of them.

Doug

You're joking right?

That image is made from the RAW JPg's at the JPL website - which are stretched, and uncalibrated. It is not a nasa image release.

It looks blue in images made from the raw JPGs because the auto-stretch algorythm used to show the most detail from each image will render blue images much lighter than they actually are when calibrated.  The issue isnt up for debate I'm afraid - properly calibrated, published and peer reviewed data demonstrates what colour the sky actually is.

That is using properly calibrated RAD files published via the PDS.

If you do auto-levels on it, i.e. stretch it so that there is at least one white pixel on each channel and one black pixel on each channel, you get..

Now really - which is more likely - that purely by chance, images taken on mars thru red, green AND blue filters have exactly the same max and min brightness values in every single image taken of EVERYTHING ( as that what claiming that image is 'trye colour' is to suggest ) - or that actually - properly calibrated, peer reviewed raw data generates something perhaps a little more  accurate?

Doug

Oh - conspiracists will never be silenced. 

If I built, launched and landed a rover with HDTV cameras and toured around landing sites showing discarded hardware - their claims would be that

I was part of the conspiracy and was faking the data
The hardware was flown without people on board
It was put their by aliens

Doug

Actually - the shuttle has a <1% launch failure - only Challenger failed during launch.  Columbia is a <1% entry failure

Doug

BIG drives for Oppy in the past few days

Doug

Hoagland is nothing but a fraud and a scientific vandal.

He tells nothing but lies simply to extract popularity and thus money from people stupid enough to believe him.

He's pathetic.

Doug

If you're using Win XP - then save the image - double click on it and in the normal windows image viewer there's a rotate thing. I find that orientating things so that the light source is from the top often helps - although given time, I can usually MAKE my brain flip inverted craters back 'into' the image as opposed to looklike like a strange lump with a sharm ring-ditch - and I do that by imagining, given the actual light direction, what a little cube sat on the surface would look like, and which direction the shadow would be cast - I often find that dodgy craters pop back into place when I tell my brain where the light is.

very VERY rarely can I watch the film of the Apollo 11 LEm landing wihtout seing lots of domes on the surface instead of craters.

Doug

They've left argo behind already - wizzed straight past with approx 390m of driving from the heatshield

Doug

Well - regardless of any ACTUAL reason - the coding error that the review board found ( the deployment of the landing pads triggering the touchdown sensors and thus prematurely setting a software switch to turn off the thrusters ) would have killed the lander anyway   So - if it was a communications error, fine, but it was a communications error from a lump of debris that hit the ground at great speed after failing to use it's thrusters to land.

Doug

I think ESA did enough for the main stream media.  There was 'the' surface image ready for the next days press - and colour data overlayed for the Sunday papers as well.  In terms of the mass media - thats all they want. They wont mention Huygens again, whatever data and imagery is extracted from it's data set. That's the fault of the media - but most of the people I've shown the pictures to they've gone "wow", and not "huh"

Doug

I know you're just being a typical cultural vandal and/or troll - but your technical questions are answerable.

This camera had to survive -200 degrees temperatures, 7 years in space, and was designed in the early '90s.  That it exists at all is an astonishing achievment.

The only feasable power supply for Huygens was batteries. an RTG could have given it a longer life - but would have made it too heavy to launch.  Given that it had to spend 3 weeks in a coast - it's great that we got as much surface science as we did.

The probe was NOT built in 1997 - it was built at around 1992-1995.

Dont for one SECOND try and pull the conspiracy story on this one. theres THOUSANDS of engineers from europes - and THOUSANDS of engineers from america who worked on this - there is no way in HELL that a conspiracy could be consructed with that infrastrucutre - it's an impossibility. The fact that you suggest it alone suggests how much of a troll you really are.

It was fundamentally an atmoshperic probe. The orig. plan expected THREE MINTUES of surface operations - never long enough to move a camera around once on the surface

The data link from Huygens to Cassini was 8kbps - and over a 3 hour misison, that allows a grand total of 10.8 Mbyts of data - which has to include data from EVERY instrument. That approx 1/3rd of it is imagery is more than should be expected.  The level of light at Titan is 1/64th that hear on earth by virtue of the distance it is from the sun. Consider the haze and cloud of titan - you can take that to about 1% of the light here on earth - essentially less than a moon-light evening.  In 1992 -the technology was not around to have a digital imager work in those light conditions - but the made one - and it worked, 13 years later. If you're unwilling or unable to understand the difficulties in doing it - I suggest you just refrain from looking like a moron and shut up.

Huygens did NOT cost $3B.  It cost approx 300M Euros - of EUROPEAN tax payers money - not american money.  In a twist of fate - the cameras which you so happily slag off were built buy the Uni of Arizona.

The lander WAS able to determine immediately what it landed in or on. It landed on something equiv. to a wet clay.  It did not land on an ocean, there was instrumentation on board to measure the tilt, and to tech echo soundings if it did.

Essentially - you're being an idiot - but I've taken the time to try and explain the specifics of some questions you ask.

This is the first lander on a moon other than our own. The first lander beyond Mars. The first visit to a pre-biotic earth analogue. I'm european, I pay my taxes - and I'm blown away by the data thats been sent back. 

The greatest minds in the world built this thing. If you REALLY think you can do better - off you go - no one's stopping you.

Let me get this straight - you're vitriolic and scathing of a probe you know NOTHING about, and are not prepared to LEARN about. You know nothing of the rest of Cassini's 4+ year mission around Saturn. You know nothing of the technology of the early '90s - the limits of technology - fundamental limits of communications technology - difficulties in travelling billions of miles across space - the radiation damage that can be caused - the 1200 degree entry, the -200 degree descent and the 12G landing.  And yet you consider yourself informed enough to criticise this achievment.

Tell me - what amazing things have YOU achieved recently.

Doug

Or the sensitivity of the camera?

Doug