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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."
The lander actually crashed and NASA does not want to admit to another failure. The pictures are done by some graphic artist who is taking pictures of his sons sandbox and doctoring them up with Photoshop. The rocks are actually cat turds and the rover in the pictures are some beaten up tonka toys.
Case in point: WMDs in Iraq.
Is it political? OF COURSE! One would be an idiot not to think so.
Let's take a look at the current state of our union. We're facing record deficits, we're engaged in a two-front war, the economy is in the shitter and Bush still wants to expand the space program/NASA/JPL/whatever? Even the conservatives are shocked and angered by these words.
Don't get me wrong. As a geek and someone who really used to be into astronomy there's be nothing more I'd like to see more than space exploration. I'm just trying to say it like it is.
I skimmed the article and, personally, I think it's less about uniting the people and more about crony capitalism. How would a mission to mars (habitation, more satellites, whatever) unite the people? It's ludicrous to compare it to Kennedy. At that time, no one had gone to the moon and we were in competition with Russia. Since then we've built a space station so I think the popular opinion is that it wouldn't be so much of a quantum leap to colonize a planet (I'm not saying it's easy, I'm just talking about popular notion). Plus we have no competition so there would be less of a sense of patriotism behind it.
The way I see it he just wants to throw some funds back into his home state. That seems like the most logical and simple explanation.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
This really isn't worth being featured on Slashdot. There is no conspiracy, and the authors paranoia is just plain scary. I can't get a good article about thermo-electric engines posted, but this idiot gets this twaddle posted? Slashdot, meet Fox News, Fox News, meet Slashdot.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
Right on, how insightful. After all, we wouldn't have given the billions of dollars that we did for the original normal color pictures they took out in the Mojave desert, would we? And it's certainly not the job of NASA to do good science and educate the people, they should be more like George Lucas and ILM and give people the crap they expect, not what's really there. Sure, change those colors. Edit those pictures, take out anything that might be disturbing. Outright lie about the resolution of the images. Make structures go away. You're so damn insightful.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.