Is The Mars Rover Cam Life-Blind?

Here you can see the response of the cam.




Here you can see the respose of chlorophyll.

What do you think?

arch, i would love to understand what you are trying to say but I don't read or speak graphs

spell it out for me in layman's terms

Phew. I'm glad that I wasn't the only one.

wheres the little smiley with the bs flag when i need 'im?

The "color" of chlorophyll cannot be picked up by the cam.

The frequencies of light the color represents are not picked up by the cam. They are excluded due to the gaps in the spectrum of the filters.

The rovers could be in a sea of blue-green algae and we would not see it.

Why would they make a camera that couldnt pick up green?

So that you would not see the sea of algae surrounding the landers?

Even if they didnt let the camera see green youd still be able to see the texture of the algae...you can tell that its all sand. and algae doesnt look like sand.

Bull Cr@p! ur still gonna see the algae or watever it is no matter if it can pick up the colour...wats wrong with u ppl, just accept that NASA are doin the best they can, give them a break! i doubt u will be happy until we get invaded by the apparent aliens that some of u feel already inhabit the subterraneous cavities of the earth. Then wat are u gonna do, see who can shout loudest 'i knew it!', no ur gonna cry like little girls

so then basically you would be able to "see through" the sea of algae wouldnt there still be places on the ground that you wouldnt be able to see due to the fact that it would be seeing through something, i didnt know we could look through things. wouldnt there be some sort of imprint in the ground?

What it is saying is that the wavelengths that are the clorophyll green are not picked up by the camera.

It is like a dog, they have a smaller concentration of rods (or cones, cant remember which) allowing them to only pick up certain wavelengths of color, so everything probably appears grey to them.

Something similar would happen here, but we would still be able to detect the texture of it. And this is what nasa is doing, whenever a color appears that should be another color, they do their best to fill it in with its correct color.

What's wrong with you?

Go on, suck up your media like its as pure as the driven snow. Tastes great to sheeple who don't think enough to comprehend the ramifications of a shock to the central nervous system of the societal pasteur you graze in. There is nothing going on in the pictures, there is no algea, you are in fact sane and anyone who suggests anything you haven't been prepared for is crazy. Your world is served to you on a precooked platter, grow up and start inquiring (although I know they stopped teaching that in school a long time ago).



Inquisitive. LOL

[Edited on 2-10-2004 by insite]

LMAO, thanx for that great summation of my life. And by the way, the use of big words doesnt somehow make u better than me, lol. I didnt say that my world was perfect. And anyway, the fact that i might choose to believe some of the things that the media delivers does not make you right and me wrong. Just because i dont want to amplify the cascade effect of paranoia and distrust that can evolve into crackpot theories, doesnt mean that my opinion is misguided or false. Plz just love me

P.s. Shove ur big words up ur ass

Just because you don't want to amplify the cascade effect of paranoia doesn't make you right and me wrong. Just because I question most media and believe next to nothing doesn't make you right and me wrong. Just because I used a word that has two more letters than the one you have describing your mood does not mean I'm trying to belittle you. But when you start hurling insults at a large number of members on this board I feel inclined to stand up for everyones right to question.

Look okay, there is no way to know if this camera can see algae or not. This example can be applied to a million issues. It's people who get on someone elses case for not accepting what has been provided to them via media that this website aims to combat. If you're going to post something, don't post something rediculously obnoxious or you're going to get smacked. Just letting you know.

P.S. No one will ever love you. Sorry.

Here, just to show you that I'm not a complete crackhead who has to believe every conspiracy theory because my life is so boring, I'll throw in my two cents to debunk this thread's topic:

Why would NASA scientists want to send a rover to mars that could not "see" life? Wouldn't NASA scientists be equally interested in finding some sort of organism as the general public? What are we paying them for? Are they searching for oil on Mars?

Looks to me like you're simply mis-reading the graphs. There are several appropriate filters that can capture both high-response and high-absorption regions from chlorophyll A and B.

Chlorophyll A has a high absorption in the 390-430 nm range, looks like. Filters R1 and L7 are perfect for seeing that darkness. It also has another sharp peak at around 670 nm. Lo and behold, filter L3 is dead-centered on that range.

Chlorophyll B is strong in the 420-480 range... filters R1, L7 and L6 provide solid coverage there. The secondary signal is at 610-630... filter L4 isn't a great match, but the edge of it might see the 610 nm signal (or more accurately, the lack thereof).

Of course, to understand what you'd really see, though, keep in mind that these are the ABSORPTION characteristics of chlorophyll.

The reason chlorophyll makes plants seem primarily green is because it DOESN'T absorb green... it instead absorbs a lot of human-visible blue and red... so a light source with all three frequency ranges (like sunlight, which is black-body radiation) bouncing off of a plant leads to a chunk of the human-visible red and blue being absorbed, and the green reflected.

Hence, plants look green to us.

OK then, if we are looking for plants on Mars, which filters will they show bright in?

Why, the green filter, of course!

Filter L5 at 530 nm sits smack-dab in the middle of the human-visible light frequencies that are reflected (not absorbed) by chlorophyll A and B. So green plants would show as bright in L5, and dark in R1, L7, L6, L3 and very slightly darker in L4.

A typical Earth green plant shot with a simple mix of L4-L5-L6 would look primarily green, with a stronger than typical red signal. Any doubts about whether cholorphyll was present could be verified by closely examining the relative darkness of the signal in L7, L6, and L3, with a very strong signal from L5 (All of the R2-R8 filters would probably show bright as well)

For a near-perfect mix for detecting the presence of chlorophyll, use an RGB mix of L3-L5-L6... and it should give a wall-to-wall undeniably green signal.

I doubt you could ask for much better narrow-bandpass filter coverage.

I don't know what might have led you to any other conclusion...

Except perhaps ignorance that response (i.e. transmittance) is the opposite of absorption?

If so, I'm glad that I'm able to deny the ignorance.

The Pancam is quite a fantastic tool... I'd go so far as to call it something of an engineering masterpiece. It's all the more pity that we seem to have a set of Keystone Kops running the darned thing and mangling the results along the way.


[Edited on 2-10-2004 by BarryKearns]

Since the Rovers are a "geological" expedition, the equipment is optimised for geological purposes. Thus the heavy emphasis on IR and UV.

BarryKearns:

I believe you are mistaken.

The mars rover is a fake..its been faked from the very top of the space galatic society..I have proof of this and will post it on another occasion once i feel safe enough that the mibs are not watching me...

will keep you posted

You can believe what you like... but I'd be interested to find out which aspect of my explanation you believe is a mistake.

You do understand that chlorophyll is the component that makes plants green, right?

And from your own chart, you posted, the peaks on the absorbance chart show that they are strongest in frequencies that are identified as red and blue, and very low at green frequencies... right?

From those two pieces of info, you should be able to determine why chlorophyll looks green to humans... and why it should reflect light which would give a very weak signal in L3 and L6, but very strong in L5.

Belief has little to do with it... it's a matter of understanding the dynamics of reflectance and absorption of light frequencies.

Science is not about belief. It's about following the data and making logical conclusions that are consistent with that data.

Your conclusion is utterly contradictory to the data you've presented. That tells me you (most likely) don't understand what the data means.

I'm sorry if you find that bothersome, but that's just the way it is. If you'd like to learn more about the frequencies present in sunlight, I'd recommend Googling on "black body radiation", and then finding some good reference materials on absorption, transmittance, and frequency response in digital images.

To see what the REFLECTANCE of chlorophyll looks like (and that's what the filtered images would show as bright... the reflectance, not the absorption), please see Figure 2A on page 5 of
this paper.

Ignorance is not a vice... but seeking to eliminate it from ourselves when we find it is (IMO) a definite virtue.
Avail yourself of the opportunity to learn.


[Edited on 2-11-2004 by BarryKearns]