Colorization of Mars Images?

ares2003 writes "There is no scientific reason, why JPL is colorizing Mars in that dull red tint as in their press release images. In the latest panorama image, there is a hint, that they deliberately altered the colors, as the blue and green spots on the color calibration target (the sundial) suddenly converted to bright red and brown. Source of original images: 1, 2 - (for highres replace "br" with "med"). At normal weather conditions, as we have at the moment, there should be a blue sky on Mars and earthlike colors. Furthermore the sky looks overcasted on the pictures as it cannot be considering the sharp shadows on the sundial. If the sky was overcast, then because of diffuse lighting, there would be no shadows. A few years ago, I did an investigation about that very same topic for the Viking and Pathfinder missions."

Check the links, editors

[shystershep (643874)]

For more hard-hitting 'information' from the submitter of this story, visit his website: Alternative Areology and Archeology [mars-news.de]. Browse his conspiracy theories and check out his evidence of cities on Mars, spaceflight in ancient Indian Literature, and learn the secrets of the pyramids!

Way to go, Michael.

Re:Check the links, editors

[efuseekay (138418)]

There will be a new story on how the government conspire to shutdown the mars-news.de website on the 9th of Jan 2004....

coincidentally after this story was posted.

Re:Check the links, editors

[Spackler (223562)]

WOULD YOU PLEASE STOP SLASHDOTTING THIS SITE!
I am trying to do some serious research into the truth that has been hidden from my eyes. I finally find a source of hidden knowledge that is better than the one buried under the sphinx, and you geeks have to go and wreck it. _bastards_

Re:Check the links, editors

[MooCows (718367)]

Actually, (AFAIK, IANAS, correct me if I'm wrong) the Hubble images are correct, but they're just using pretty colours to represent different kinds of radiation, not just the normal light.

Re:Check the links, editors

[GabeK (701376)]

They do that so that different elements of the image can be more easily identified, not to make things prettier. It does make for some very impressive images, but that isn't the point.

Re:Check the links, editors

[science_gone_bad (730182)]

"They do that so that different elements of the image can be more easily identified"

There's another even more important reason...most of the colors are for wavelengths of light that could not be seen anyway.

The last time I checked I could not see UultraViolet, Infrared, or X-rays.

Anyway, the color dots on the lander SHOULD look different as the lighting conditions are different on Mars due to the scattering properties of that atmosphere. Colors under Flourescent lights like we all sit under are very different than those out in the sunlight. If the images from Mars had the color corrected to pure colors, it would not be a true representation of what we would see if we were standing there.

Re:Check the links, editors

[Royster (16042)]

WHen Hubble uses false color, that fact is *always* noted at the official site. If other people use the images and drop NASA's text, they can't be held responsible.

And, yes, NASA has to color correct just about every image one of their probes or landers takes. It's necessary because of now the images are taken. That ain't no cheap digital camera up there.

Re:Check the links, editors

[djh101010 (656795)]

Actually, I was just at rednova.com yesterday looking at archives of Nasa images, and not only is this explicitly mentioned, but for many of the false-color images, they specify the method by which they were constructed (shot thorough this filter, that filter, and the other filter, and recombined, that sort of thing).

The scientists understand the real colors, the public (who funds it, after all) expects it to be red. They want red, we'll give 'em red. I'm not saying I agree with that, but I understand where they're coming from.

The veracity of the person who brought this up (Mr. Martian Pyramids and such) isn't something I'll do much commenting on.

HST Images

[cynicalmoose (720691)]

The .jpgs that NASA releases from the HST can't really be called 'false coloured' as they aren't the real data. Let me explain to those who don't spend their lives processing HST data.
The data that comes off the HST is reserved for one year to the requesting individual/organisation (and, yes, this is controversial). But it is nothing like the images that NASA releases for the general public. The HST data comes down in a series of CCD output prints, often with whatever spectroscopy data has been requested, most often as a wavelength/intensity matrix. You can't dump that easily into any image editor; it's just a string of numbers. Equally if you dump all the spectra onto one image you will see a nearly black and white picture. So you select the spectra that interest you, and look for anomalies. The resulting pictures used are of little use to the non-astronomer - they aren't full colour, and are often just 4-bit colour showing intensity of a particular spectrum. The pretty pictures come from working out what looks good and combining it, so all images are 'false colour' in some way or another.

I don't know about the Spirit mission, but I'd guess the same applied

Valid reasons for this

[overunderunderdone (521462)]

I was watching a press conference on CSPAN and the guys at JPL actually brought this up themselves. The thing is the camera's have filters for a wide variety of wavelengths many of which aren't visual light at all. Each camera has a different array of filters and actually only share two filters in common for stereo vision.

I got the impression that many of the fiters that ARE within the visual portion of the spectrum were only letting in narrow bands of the spectrum. Exactly what color SHOULD infra-red images be? For obvoius reasons keeping them in their "orignal" spectrum would be fairly useless - though "red" would be as close as we can come.

For just pretty pictures rather than scientific data NASA is color-correcting the images - I think it is more involved than simply colorizing a black and white image. They mentioned compositing together several images from different filters to get a fair approximation of what the human eye would percieve if it was there.

Re:Check the links, editors

[aenea (34844)]

My keyboard is obviously a part of the conspiracy. Butterscotch martian sky [nasa.gov]

Re:Check the links, editors

[GabeK (701376)]

Right on! And, as we all know, the Martian sky is green. This can be explained by the dust left over from all the money that we've crashed or otherwise blown in past missions on Mars.

Re:Check the links, editors

[Tassach (137772)]

Why shouldn't NASA color-enhance images used for PUBLIC RELATIONS purposes? This isn't the data that scientists are going to use - it's advertising, designed to get them good PR and consequentally, more funding. Joe Sixpack doesn't care about science, but he does like shiny things. Scientists, and anyone else who really needs or wants it, can get the raw data.

Feynman

[sleepingsquirrel (587025)]

You might be interested in a little something by Richard Feynman [brocku.ca]

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen. For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing-- and if they don't support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.

No Secret

[eean (177028)]

Its no secret that they doctor the images for press release. They also have the original available. Check out Maestro, it was mentioned on Slashdot a few days ago, its almost the same software JPL uses, and the images in the data set are the original ones.

Pictures are taken over time!!

[Lispy (136512)]

Not sure if this could be the reason but the MER-A pictures aren't taken at a specific time but rather during a whole day.

That means that the colors you see on the sundial don't match all frames of the final picture you get.

NASA therefore alters the colors to match the pictures as closely as possible. Maybe this disturbs the color? Not sure though. What do you think?

There may be no scientific reason

[Nevo (690791)]

..but releasing these images to the public is a public relations endeavor, not a scientific endeavor.

Obviously doctored

[BillFarber (641417)]

The photos clearly have been doctored because they don't match the scenery in "Total Recall".

OK, I admit it.

[shoppa (464619)]

OK, I admit it. I grabbed the mars probe on its way to orbit and put it in my backyard, where I put a bunch of sand and rocks and spray painted everything brown and drab red. Some got onto the lander, my screwup. Neil and Buzz came by and gave me some advice, based on how they faked the moon landing.

My kids had lots of fun with those airbags, BTW.

Colorization is worth it

[addie (470476)]

All of the spectacular Hubble images that have been released over the past few years have been composites of various grayscale images each falsely-colored by whatever elements or wavelengths they represent. The result is a truly spectacular image that is accessible to people who have no interest in what the images actually show, but in just the beauty of the image itself. The exact same thing is true of the Spirit images.

We here on Slashdot rant about NASA budgets, and lack of interest in a manned space program. The only way to increase public interest is by catching their attention. Grayscale images simply are not going to cut it. I see no problem at all in colorizing images if it means more viewers are going to be interested, and therefore want to learn more.

Sure, the purist in me finds it a bit irritating, but as with many things, the pros far outweigh the cons.

Buy out.

[by Anonymous Coward]

You must have missed the news. Ted Turner bought out JPL yesterday.

"ballistic approach to punctuation"

[X_Bones (93097)]

My, God the submitter needs, to learn how to use commas, properly when he writes, something that hundreds of thousands of people will potentially, read...

Re:"ballistic approach to punctuation"

[HardCase (14757)]

When you're paranoid, you don't worry about punctuation...it's just one more tool that they use to get you.

-h-

Re:"ballistic approach to punctuation"

[kannibal_klown (531544)]

"My, God the submitter needs, to learn how to use commas, properly when he writes, something that hundreds of thousands of people will potentially, read..."

HOLY COW!!! William Shatner posts on SLASHDOT!!!

Re:"ballistic approach to punctuation"

[Diamon (13013)]

Well it. Could have been. Worse he could. Write like Chritopher. Walken talks.

My God, imagine a two man broadway show with Walken and Shartner in a 90 minute dialogue.

Filters

[paul248 (536459)]

The images they took are shot through near-infrared filters, and then digitally adjusted to compensate. The pan-cams each have about 16 different types of filters on a rotating wheel, but this near-infrared filter is the only color that's common to both lenses. Therefore, when they're taking stereo images, that's the best one to use. It's not a conspiracy, and they'll probably release images taken through the other filters eventually.

Uh, yeah.

[Guano_Jim (157555)]

It's a conspiracy. To make people...

BELIEVE THAT MARS IS RED!

Thanks for alerting us to that potential communist menace, senator.

It's not strange, they're trying out filters

[Jugalator (259273)]

as the blue and green spots on the color calibration target (the sundial) suddenly converted to bright red and brown.

The "sudden" change happened as NASA "suddenly" applied another filter for the camera. They do this to better detect certain things in the picture I suppose. They spoke about it on a press conference when they was asked this question.

From Mozilla guru Asa Dotzler's weblog [mozillazine.org]:

Q. Then what we're seeing that's in that Pancam image doesn't correspond to what we'd see if we were standing there?

Jim: we have a pair of red filters that give us stereo. The red you're asking about is the infrared filter which is different from the red humans see. We can convert that red easily. We also have a red filter that matches human sight red but we prefer to use the infrared filter to get matchup with both cameras. Two cameras each have 8 filters. One filter on one eye is a dense welder-like filter to look at the sun. On the left camera is low frequency and the right camera is higher frequencies. Total of 11 unique wavelengths.

infrared image posted

[morcheeba (260908)]

Ok, I went ahead and did a favor for the slashdot community and mankind. I took the fake colorized images and colored them back to the original infrared colors. You can see the results here. [firelily.com] I hope this pleases the original story submitter.

Mars has become a political agenda

[Eyah....TIMMY (642050)]

Unfortunately, it seems the primary motivation for the Mars for the general population is now sensationalism. I'm sure the Slashdot audience how a different view on Mars though.
USA Today has a good article [usatoday.com] about how Mars is shifting from science to politics.
The Washington Post explains better the goals of the current US gov [washingtonpost.com].

I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing because that's usually how space projects get more funding but it might explain why the photos are looking more "nice to the user" than "scientifically realistic".

Re:Mars has become a political agenda

[John_Booty (149925)]

USA Today has a good article [usatoday.com] about how Mars is shifting from science to politics.

Wait a minute. You're suggesting that missions to other celestial bodies might have... political or nationalistic overtones that often far dwarf the actual scientific value of the mission?

Um... do you know anything about the space race between the U.S. and Soviet Union?

To put the conspiracy theories to rest:

[Delphix (571159)]

They're probably using a blue filter to block Raleigh scattering. We do a lot of image processing, and it's common to use a blue filter in images where you want sharp detail and aren't as concerned about the proper color. Blue light tends to scatter more because of it's low wavelength. If you don't filter it you can end up with just a haze in your image where you'd otherwise have sharp detail in the image.

So put the conspiracy theory to rest.

Bill Nye saves the day

[legoleg (514805)]

Read here [nwsource.com]

The sundial from a little while ago helps find tint and all. The pics need calibration.... doesn't sound like a conspiracy to me.

To heck with the recolored images...

[banda (206438)]

...what I want to know is:
Why does the Spirit rover [nasa.gov] have an Atari game console joystick installed on it?

to CYA, natch

[gosand (234100)]

..what I want to know is: Why does the Spirit rover have an Atari game console joystick installed on it?

Probably to protect the rover in case of this scenario [kudla.org].

There is actually an answer to this...

[barfy (256323)]

This is a "Bill Nye" project. [astrobio.net]

What I'd like to see

[suso (153703)]

What I want to see if Mars at night. Why can't they take a few pictures of what the two moons look like from the surface? They always take daytime pictures.

Re:What I'd like to see

[orac2 (88688)]

The Rovers are solar powered. Taking pictures would suck a lot of power from the batteries otherwise needed to make iti through the night.

Re:What I'd like to see

[entrager (567758)]

Possibly because they aren't actually visible from the surface. They are pretty dang small.

For geek's sake:

Our moon has an apparent size in the sky of about 1800 arcseconds. This is found by arctan(radius of the moon/distance to the moon) * 2 [google.com].

By comparison, Phobos would appear to be about 900 [google.com] arcseconds from the surface of Mars. Deimos would be about 200 [google.com] arcseconds.

So actually Phobos would appear to be about half the diameter of our moon and Deimos would appear to be about 1/9 the diameter. I suppose that's not terribly small, but you also need to recognize that far less light will be hitting them and then reflecting off. Phobos would be much dimmer than our moon, and Deimos is dark in color, so it may not be easy to see even with the naked eye.

I imagine capturing an image of the moons with the camera on board a rover would be difficult.

Re:What I'd like to see

[entrager (567758)]

For futher comparison, when it is closest (as is was recently), Mars itself appears to be about 18 [google.com] arcseconds in diameter when viewed from Earth.

Mosaic

[drooling-dog (189103)]

I don't know about the colors, but one thing that I did find odd is the obvious and clumsy seams between the component images of the mosaics. I used to work with satellite imagery back in the early 80's, and it was pretty routine to resample the images so that they fit together seamlessly. I wonder why JPL isn't bothering to do that? It's not rocket science, after all...

Re:Mosaic

[Zordak (123132)]

It's not

rocket science, after all...

Which is exactly the problem. Never send a rocket scientist to do an artist's job.

The Martian Sky is butterscotch, not blue

[UPAAntilles (693635)]

This story should be pulled, it is wrong in too many places, and is just a bunch of conspiracy mumbo-jumbo. The pictures are slightly modded for color, but that's because it's a collage

As evidenced, here [nasa.gov], the Martian sky is more yellow/butterscotch (they used the Viking landers American flag to balance the colors properly,pictures are on the website). The Martian sky doesn't really get "overcasted" as there is no moisture in the air to create clouds! There is dust, yes, but the atmosphere is so thin, the sunlight can still go through it. Ares2003 has a few loose screws-My guess is that the digital image of the craft itself was taken later in the martian day, and modifying the color of the photo was the only way to make it look like it "fit in". Mars should not have "earth-like" colors. Any glance through a moderately-powerful telescope will show that the "red planet" is, in fact, red in color (iron oxide dust). Those more yellow pictures of Mars floating around are actually not real photographs, but generated images from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter data.

To see lots of pictures and some scientific conjecture and analysis, you can go here [the-planet-mars.com]

All color images are colorized

[kindbud (90044)]

No device "sees" colors the way humans see color. Heck, no two humans see color the same way. All images, especially science images, whether they are photographic prints or digital images, are colorized and manipulated and stretched and bent and filtered and modified to enphasize the details the investigator is interested in.

You think Jupiter is a really garish ball of swirling colorful gasses? Think again. All the Galileo and Voyager images have saturation boosted a great deal, and the contrast is stretched mightily. Furthermore, the luminance layer is deconvolved to bring subtle spatial details into sharper relief. To the human eye, Jupiter is a rather bland beige-ish ball with some hint of subtle color here and there, and not much obvious detail. The same goes for Io, which is usually depicted as a bright yellow/orange malestrom. It's "real" colors - what a human in orbit would see - are also rather bland.

It's obvious! Doppler shift!

[Punk Walrus (582794)]

Mars is very far away, and right now is moving away at a rapid speed from Earth in its orbit. The Doppler effect (the ones that make sounds go up in pitch as they approach you, then go down as they move away from you, like a police car going past) teaches us that as light approaches us, the wavelengths get compressed, and they go blue! So, Mars is red due to the Red Shift in spectrum because it's actually going away... away [Ernie-like snicker]

... oh, I can't go on. But there's so much misinformation in that site, that I thought I'd add my own bullshit that sounded scientific, too. Can I get my grant now? At least give me back my tin foil hat... Jodie Foster gave it to me!

Conspiracy Theory Made E-Z:
1. Assume people care enough about you to fool you.
2. Add scientific terms and definitions to give credibility, even if it really doesn't have much to do with the theory
3. ???
4. Profit!

____________________________________________
"Red shift shows increasing totalitarian domination of the outer reaches of the universe. Write your congressman!" - from Science Made Stupid

Re:Don't believe should be a blue sky

[mark-t (151149)]

With enough dust in the air, yes... Mars would have a red sky.

But the same light refraction phenomenon that gives Earth a blue sky as seen from the ground should give Mars a blue sky as seen from the ground as well. Enough dust in the atmosphere could interfere with that sufficiently to create a red hue, but this should not be the norm in calm weather conditions.

Mod Parent down- incorrect info

[UPAAntilles (693635)]

No, the sky is blue on earth due to the exact conditions we have here. If our atmosphere was less dense, the sky would be darker (less diffused light). Our atmosphere is so dense and made up of the right stuff (nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide) that our sky is actually violet. However, because our sun puts off more yellow and green light then any other colors, our eyes have adapted to seeing those colors better, and the sky appears to be "sky blue". As the atmosphere gets less dense, it shifts left on the EM scale (roygbiv), and gets darkers overall. As it gets more dense, it shifts left on the EM scale(that's why sunsets are red, the sunlight passes through more air at sunset and sunrise) It's actually very complex to determine what color a sky will be. It depends on these factors-
Incoming light colors
atmosphere make-up
atmosphere density
angle of incidence
the eye of the observer

That's why Mars has a butterscotch sky- very low density atmosphere made up almost entirely of CO2

Re:It's quite simple really

[mark-t (151149)]

Why the F*** would they care whether or not some conspiracy freaks choose to misinterpret the facts as a coverup?

Catering to it is no better than being an advocate of the conspiracy theories in the first place.

Re:Gary Larson Reference

[56ker (566853)]

Violets are Red,

Roses are Blue,

JPL saw it,

and now you will too.

Re:one more verse

[by Anonymous Coward]

People like you
Make such a todo
'bout images they ibue
With an altered hue

'Tis nothing that's new
This thing they do
With pix they do screw
Boo hoo, boo hoo.