So are they still using homemade camera's...?
When you can go down in the local suparmarket and buy a cheap color camera... Why can't NASA make color pictures. And atleast test the camera before they launch those exspensive rockets...

Originally posted by Ram
So are they still using homemade camera's...?
When you can go down in the local suparmarket and buy a cheap color camera... Why can't NASA make color pictures. And atleast test the camera before they launch those exspensive rockets...

Actually its a very expensive camera.

I'm sure there are reasons for the broad spectrum running deep into the IR range, but a reason will not give you true color images.

The reason the Mars rovers were color blind in because they were on a geology mission.

But I don't see why not use RGB and IR with the bandwidth they have now.

Before we let NASA send another cam into space we should send it to an eye doctor, and I want a second opinion.

Okay, and your point is...?

Originally posted by cmdrkeenkid
Okay, and your point is...?

When NASA starts displaying color images from the new probe remember that its not real color.

It may be possible to hide things that would stand in in RBG by making them the same color as the background.

But what would they want to hide on Mars?

Okay... What images arn't false color? What images haven't been false color for the past few decades?

You know why the images are false color? Because the scientists actually don't get as much data from studying the images as we see them. They're, more often than not, studied as raw data. Do scientists need to see the pretty pictures? No, they don't. They're more interested in the raw data. The pretty pictures are more for PR than anything else.

And cameras don't work by including all of the spectrum. If you want to see a certain wavelength you have to block others. A simple book or websearch on photography and optics would have told you that.

And besides, it would be JUST as easy to hide something in true color images as false color images. It's all in the processing.

So whats new? I ain't American, but I can tell you unabashedly that YOUR tax is being used to fund NASA, your so called Black Projects, Top Secret Projects, secret government agencies and so on, going to great lengths to keep information secret. Thats an obsession with your government and affiliated agencies.

Why are you guys being allowed to be taken for a ride? Don't you have the spunk to sort them out? Its YOUR money they're using to fool you! So shake a leg and get movin'. Its no use bellyaching. DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!

[edit on 17-2-2006 by mikesingh]

The camera is not color-blind.

It is set to perceive some blue but mostly green, red and near-infrared.

This is useful in false colors. On earth it's useful for vegetation health...as well as ore deposits through clay alteration.

It'll have a geologic purpose...these missions are not site-seeing trips...they aren't wasting millions of dollars to take pretty pictures...

Maldives, the problem with any remote sensing is you only receive data. Thus to have things such as true color, you need infomation of the surroundings to make an image.

Color photography is nice, but not all that useful, so useful data is collected and sent back instead.

In the Mars rover cases, the sensors collect wavelenghts along a continuum, thus the scientists have more options of what wavelength to work in specifically by merely manipulating the data appropriately.

To do this they have the calibration target.

This target allows them to determine what effects Martian atmosphere and sun angle and weather and etc are having on the image at that moment it was taken.

So usually every image you want to see has an accompanied image below that is of the calibration target taken at about the same time.

This allows the team to compile "true color images" and they come out to what NASA shows.

The site you gave for instance, is wrong, because you can't simply "reduce the red" and say "oh that looks better"...you have to judge based on the calibration target.

Whatever that target's value is should approximate "255" pixel value...but because of possible dust on it now...I think it's a little less than that...not sure what they've done about that.

Either way; with a calibrated image you can take the blue//red//green channels and get an image that should be what you would see in person to a very good degree.

Hi Stratrf_Rus

Thanks for the reply, I get your point, I think, but the article I posted and others I have seen in the past, if I have read them correctly, seem to allude to the fact that in some of the images, the ones taken of the calibration target seem to be totally "off" and in others it seems to be, well more or less the same as we would see with the naked eye - in other words, what the ordinary person would see if he were stood there on the surface. ( That was a looooooooong sentence!) I kniow that there is a dust element to be taken into consideration, but the larger panoramas all seem the same - if there was dust in the atmosphere at the time the pics were taken, surely that would be reflected in the images - some more orange than others, but that doesn't seem to be the case - they all seem to have the same caste to them.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that if, for example, i were stood on the surface of Mars with a consumer digital camera, I would take a picture. That picture would then be written to a storage media - say Compact Flash. This image would be written in the form of data would it not? The data from the card could then be sent back to Earth in the same way as the data is now - think I have that correct. We can do this with a mobile phone now - take a pic and send it to the other side of the world - and this is with commonplace consumer equipment. I am not from the US, and obviously I pay nothing in tax for their budget, so tell me to butt out if you like, but the people who are paying would surely like to see some pics which represent Mars as we would see it if we were there. I do not in anyway claim that the data that is sent is more revealing to a scientist, but I still think that even the guys at NASA would like to see it as we would if we were there. ( In fact they might do - this is a conspiracy site after all) As for the pretty pics thing, well good PR is surely an element that affects budgets is it not?

Still think, like Archangel, there's more that could have been done.

Thing just occurred to me as well - with a sound capability, we could have maybe understood the "carwash" on the solar panels a bit better as well! I don't know what you think, but as I said as a species we are curious, and we are explorers and I think that for the money it cost, more could have come out of it.

Maldives, the problem with any remote sensing is you only receive data. Thus to have things such as true color, you need infomation of the surroundings to make an image.

What you need are the three color parts within RBG specifications.

The three here are way outside of that that.

Even the first two extend beyond RGB range.

Maldives, I think I figured out how to address the problem you're discussing.

The problem is that raw data is not in JPEG format, it's in a text format.

It's a long chain of 1s and 0s.

Recently, because of the data load, NASA has been converting their raw data into a JPEG format before sending to Earth...this has problems in its own right but they feel they can work around them.

The problem is that JPEG formats are compressed files, this loses data.

That's why whenever you make a Bitmap into a JPEG and then the JPEG back into a Bitmap you have lost a LARGE amount of information.

Bitmaps are non-compressed and are usually used for Data Analysis.

So are TIFFs and etc.

So when you take a picture with a digital camera it automatically converts the file into a JPEG, and you lose important information.

Now I'm not exactly sure how much difference there is with the Rover cams and the Digital camera's compression...but I'm sure a digital camera is more destructive of raw data even still.

The rover was built with the ability to take normal pictures as well as many other scientific pictures...so it in fact IS a digital camera as you are saying...but it's more than that.

Normally your camera will adjust the image for light levels as it takes the picture...so it calibrates the image right there.

NASA does the same thing...only they have to be using the calibration target to do it...and so they do it more manually.

So the raw data is still wierd if you just use it straight...such as the most recent color image we saw of a deep blue sky.