From: Lan Fleming <lfleming5@houston.rr.com>
Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2004 13:49:11 -0600
Fwd Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2004 09:30:53 -0500
Subject: Re: Filer's Files #02 - 2004 - Fleming


>From: Ray Stanford <dinotracker@earthlink.net>
>To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net>
>Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2004 17:27:52 -0500
>Subject: Re: Filer's Files #02 - 2004 - Stanford

>>From: George A. Filer <Majorstar@aol.com>
>>To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net>
>>Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2004 17:08:41 EST
>>Subject: Filer's Files #02 -- 2004

>I am concerned about your silly pronouncement in Filer's Files #
>02, Wednesday, January 7, 2004, where, in an Editor's Note, you
>declare, "...NASA and JPL apparently want Mars to appear
>red/orange. If the sky is blue like Earth's you are seeing the
>real colors."

>Frankly, considering the paranoid delusion abroad in some parts
>of Ufology, I don't know if you are implying that the landing on
>Mars is fake and that they are deliberately discoloring earth's
>sky to deceive us in a fake scene, or whether you are just
>deluded in imagining that NASA doesn't (for unimaginable
>reasons) want us to know the real color of the sky on Mars.

Ray,

By no means are doubts about the authenticity of the color of
JPL Mars images a conspiracy theory akin to Apollo moon hoax
theories. The person who first raised allegations about JPL
tampering with image colors was Ron Levin, now a professor of
physics at MIT and the son of Gil Levin, the principal
investigator for the Viking lander labeled-release experiments.

The first color image from one of the landers showed a blue sky,
an image that made it to the newspapers. Levin was present at
JPL when that first picture came in, and he says that the image
color was "adjusted" on orders from one of the project managers
to make everything more reddish and that it was done without any
scientific basis.

In an article at:

http://mars.spherix.com/spie2003/SPIE_2003_Color_Paper.htm

Levin has posted a paper published in the SPIE proceedings that
makes the following objections to the reddish tint that
everything (including the yellow cables on the Spirit rover Mac
Tonnies wrote about) has in JPL images of the surface of Mars:

"The weak link in the imaging process for both missions was the
reliance on imaging color charts reflecting Martian ambient
light. While the reflectivity of the charts is well known, the
spectrum of their illumination on Mars is not. 'Calibrated'
images are usually reddish, attributed to atmospheric dust, but
hues range widely because of the great uncertainty in the
illumination spectrum. Solar black body radiation, the same on
Mars as on Earth, is minimally modified by the atmosphere of
either planet. For red dust to change the spectrum
significantly, reflected light must exceed the transmitted
light. Were this the case, shadows would be virtually
eliminated. Viking images show prominent shadows. Also,
Pathfinder=B9s solar cells, activated by blue light, would have
failed under the predominately red spectrum generally attributed
to Mars."

The motivation that Levin suspects for the alteration has
nothing at all to do with NASA preferences for a red sky over
blue. It's the color of the rocks, not the sky, that may have
been the problem. The image as first presented with the blue sky
showed greenish patches on some of the rocks that suggested the
possible presence of some form of plant life akin to lichen. The
sizes of the greenish patches changed with the season.
Increasing the red tint makes these patches less evident. If
that were the motivation, then the sky red is only a side
effect.

Astronomers who imaged Mars with the Hubble space telescope
shortly before the Pathfinder landing said the atmospheric
conditions were calm enough that there should have been little
dust in the atmosphere and they predicted that the sky should
appear blue in Pathfinder images taken from the surface. But all
images taken by Pathfinder show a red sky in the versions
released to the public.

Would the geologists at JPL be so hostile to the possibility of
life on Mars that they'd do something so unprincipled? In my
opinion, they are and they might.