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Curiosity's Latest High-Res Photo Looks Like Earth
New submitter bbianca127 writes "Curiosity sent a picture down to us, and it looks a lot like Earth. Actually, the picture's color quality has been changed — to human eyes, the landscape would look a lot more reddish. Still, it looks remarkably like the southwestern United States (bringing to mind the Arrested Development quote about how Lucille Bluth would rather be dead in California than alive in Arizona)." Definitely a different sense of the place than the one given by the reddish-brown posters I remember from elementary school.
Here is a page on the MSL's site where you can see both versions of the photo:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4431
One is white-balanced and one colored. The white-balanced version represents what the scene would look like to human eyes under an Earth sky. The colored represents what the scene would look like to human eyes on Mars.
The point of using white-balanced photos is that geologists are used to looking at rocks on Earth. So when a geologist wants to judge rock characteristics using color, it helps to white-balance it so the color is similar to what it would be if looking at those rocks on Earth.
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Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Science.
Because NASA doesn't have advertising?
(Which is a completely wasted opportunity.)
As much as I love the awesome idea of moving a chunk of terrain between planets, I'm going to shoot for an informative mod and answer the question.
There is a sundial mounted on Curiosity, with a few colored stripes on it. Those stripes' colors (red, green, blue, and yellow) were recorded under Earth's lighting, Now that those same stripes are on Mars, their apparent color change in new pictures is the result of Mars' different lighting. By comparing the stripes' pictures, an approprite transformation can be determined, then applied to other pictures to compensate for the change in lighting.
We are sure because we're assuming that those stripes' actual colors haven't changed significantly during flight or landing.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
On the rover are color calibration targets (here is the one for the rover's arm's instruments). We know exactly what the colors of those targets are supposed to look like, when imaged by the cameras on the rover, under normal Earth-like lighting conditions. By looking at how those targets appear in the images we get back under Mars lighting conditions, we can do two things:
1) Learn a lot about the lighting conditions on Mars.
2) Correct the appearance of images we get back to correct for that Mars lighting.
Gee, I wonder if such an image could be available on NASA's web site. Nah, that's unthinkable.
Oh, wait, here it is: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4431
No sig today...
Here you go:
Original:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA16051.jpg
White balanced:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/676031main_pia16051-figure_2_brightened-portalfull.jpg