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Mars Sundials - True Colors, Ambiguous Hours
An anonymous reader writes "NASA's Astrobiology Magazine today has an interview with Bill Nye, the Science Guy, who spearheaded the first interplanetary sundial, which will land on Mars in early January. The Cornell sundial inscription reads "Two Worlds, One Sun" in 17 languages [including ancient Sumerian and Mayan], and was selected over such historical mottos as one French sundial that reads: "Every hour injures; the last one kills". The sundials were an inspired transformation of a needed [mainly orange-pink] color wheel to calibrate the Mars' panoramic cameras to give true Martian colors, but so resembled the shadow-casting time pieces, that Nye took it over to become an internet-updated interplanetary dial." Read on for some more.
Our reader continues: "There are no conventional hour lines at all on these dials, because unlike regular sundials, they are on moving platforms. Nye says: 'Before people figured this out back in the first era of Mars probes (also the first Disco Era) the images from the Viking spacecraft were too pink or orange. Those "over-pink" images still show up in Mars science fiction movies and Mars-themed posters and restaurant walls. One of the charming challenges is roughly, "What is an hour on Mars?" Is it a "Mour?" Is it a "quadraduodeci-sol," a twenty fourth of a sol, a Mars day? ' The interview recounts the Apollo 12 controversy over whether one of the first lunar probes, Surveyor, returned viable contaminants to Earth."
And they could have used a colour chart from a paint store with a digital watch taped to the side for the same effect.
Occam's (spelling?) razor, people. Go for the simplest solution.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!
The images aren't meant to be realistic, they're meant to be representational. The images mean that humans have a torso, a smaller head, and 4 limbs in upper and lower pairs. Remember that these plaques may be seen by entities with no concept of shading, muscles, or any other style of art that we either innately comprehend due to our brain's "greedy" pattern recognition or have learned to accept as part of our years of seeing images. Every single element of the drawing must have a precise and unique meaning.
Although, the plaques carried by Voyager and Pioneer used more realistic artwork.