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Mars Rover Image Anomalies
By WhiteTiger
(Page: 1/4)
Myself and two other members of this site were sitting in the chat room discussing the new Mars Rover pictures just released. Now mind you, I'm not a big space program booster, so I've not bothered to be current on what's what, but as everyone who knows me is aware, I can whip up an opinion on just about anything so I'm taking part in the discussion and having a grand old time. Then a URL was posted, and the rest is history, of a sort.
The picture at that web location was a horizon picture taken by the Spirit rover, showing the classic barren rocky plain familiar from virtually all planetary probe images. However, this particular image had us jabbering back and forth like a huddle of fishwives in short order. We were all seeing the same thing: a small dark speck in the image above the horizon, unquestionably there, but what was it?
For a while, the weather got rather confused in that chat room, as URLs were
flying like cafeteria food in a John Belushi movie. Not being one who
multi-tasks well, I was keeping up with events rather poorly, but it finally
came clear to me that we were looking at different images that had the exact
same anomaly in them. Here is a rough chronology of events:
At first we all thought we were looking at the same image. I had to load the picture into my image processing program
and magnify it to see anything at all of the dark speck off center of the image. Apparently some of us have very good eyes to be seeing it in the unmagnified picture.
At some point that is unclear in my recollection, I found myself looking at another image which is the same scene obviously as image #1, but shows no trace of the anomaly.
The scenario now becomes very suggestive of something moving in the martian sky,
since one picture shows the unknown and another of the same area has no trace of it.
This is getting really interesting by now, and a couple of us take some time to
do a bit of image processing to try to pick out some detail. We find a pattern
of dark pixels that is three pixels wide and two pixels high. The darkest pixel
is in the lower right of the anomaly, with the lightest at the lower left. The
top pixel row also is darkest on the right, though overall lighter than the
bottom row. The overall pattern is suggestive of a wedge shape, like an old
fashioned doorstop with it's pointy end facing left. When we figure out we're
seeing the exact same pixel pattern in two different images, and that there are
images of the same areas that don't show the anomaly, excitement mounts.
Next Page (2/4)
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