Well Rfburns, I can't thank you enough and everyone else as well.

I shall now be able to sleep pleasant dreams knowing that the Mars rovers are safely going about their business as usual.

Its absolutley uncanny how easy that was to solve.

Glad you took notice and helped me out. At least it wasn't rocks for sure.

From now on I'll carefully take this into consideration when viewing the hazcam images.

Note to the mod, you may close this thread at your convenience and thank-you to all. Most educational!

MOB

No problem! The key thing to note is that the rear hazcam is mounted under the rover, and the lens on the camera is a "fish eye" wide angle view lens, which gives the image its curved look.

If the hazard cam takes an image and the rover is at an angle, like as if it was going up a hill, the camera wont see the horizon, and the result would be an image with the ground, and the underbelly with those 3 weird things. At that point it would be easy to get confused.

You know what is really odd..is that even tho NASA knows what that is,,they could have put something familiar on the underbelly, like a NASA emblem or JPL emblem or something...because in the black and white images from the hazcams, the shade of grey of the underbelly can often look like the shade of grey of the sky from a grey scale image taken by the PanCam!!!

NASA just loves to play with our heads like that. But lucky for us out here, there are those of us who have been on to NASA's "head games" for over 30 years and we spot them right away. And I love to point out to the people how NASA does their mind tricks and catch them in the act.


Cheers!!!!

[edit on 19-1-2009 by RFBurns]

The middle object, while they appear to be nothing more than rocks, has a oddly 'regular' apperance, in it's shape and some apperant patterning on the object.

My money is on rock, but my mind is open. There's just so little we know about Mars.

Originally posted by Monger
The middle object, while they appear to be nothing more than rocks, has a oddly 'regular' apperance, in it's shape and some apperant patterning on the object.

My money is on rock, but my mind is open. There's just so little we know about Mars.

What object are you refereing to? In which image is this "middle object"?

2nd line


Cheers!!!!

Originally posted by Soylent Green Is People


The "middle object" in that photo is part of the underside of the rover -- just as the whole top 1/4 part of that photo is the underside of the rover.




[edit on 1/19/2009 by Soylent Green Is People]

Ahh, I see now. Not any Martian feature at all, but in fact a part of the rover itself.

Completely out of context, I had assumed the picture was from the front of the rover, which was perhaps scaling the wall of an impact crater, looking up at three boulders on the crater's rim.

Thanks for explaining it to me.

Great thread! It's odd but in the OP picture the rover wheels look to be in a wicker chair or something. It's probably just bundled cables and wires but it's ugly and therefore an embarrassing example of our technology should an otherworlder find it.