Blue Sky and Life on Mars! How to extract the true color of Mars What is that?	last next index   page 1 of 12

Did you ever wonder about the red tinted images from Mars?
No? Maybe that's because you haven't seen any other colorization in the main-stream media like Newspapers and TV.

What is the reason for the red picture and especially for the red sky on them?
If you ask a Meteorologist about the reason for blue sky on Earth, he will name the Rayleigh scattering.
If you ask a NASA Scientist about the reason for red sky on Mars, he will name the fine dust in the Atmosphere which scatters light like during sunset on Earth.

But there are not alway dust-storms on Mars which pollutes the Atmosphere.
So there have to be also days which show blue sky!
Even NASA / JPL writes in this article about the possibility of blue sky and 3 days before Pathfinder landed, this note appeared in a press release by NASA:

"If dust diffuses to the landing site, the sky could turn out to be pink like that seen by Viking," says Philip James of the University of Toledo. "Otherwise, Pathfinder will likely show blue sky with bright clouds."

And the pictures of this clear blue sky do exist! Especially from the Viking Mission, as you can see on the next pages.

Vincent DiPietro, an engineer at NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center, wrotes a very interesting article about mysterious red-tinted pictures: Read it here. The same story told from official NASA side of view can be read on this page.

The pictures on this page were taken on the Pathfinder Mission in 1997.

Original NASA Picture from Pathfinder courtesy of JPL/NASA/Caltech. Has someone erroneously overdriven the red detector by 100% and the green by 50%?

My color corrected version.

Maybe you are wondering about the spherical formed object sitting on the airbags behind the mast? Take a look here and at Tim Beech's page, who discovered it first. I can tell you that it is no technical instrument of the Pathfinder and no rock which might have rolled onto the bag upon landing. A scientist of Washington University, who contributed to the Pathfinder Projekt, confirmed me, that this object is no instrument of the Pathfinder and could only be an optical illusion of the folded airbags. I myself do not see any proof for an optical illusion as the object changed its form during a few days as you can see on the next page. My opinion about the object is, that there are only 3 possibilities: There is a turtle-like animal living on Mars. There is a turtle-like robot operating on Mars. The image was manipulated by someone to let a turtle-like object appear. If you have any other proposal about what it could be, please contact me about this! And if you believe, Mars is too cold for life as we know it, take a look at the daily weather-report from Mars Global Surveyor and wonder about the 15°C temperature on wide areas.

An original NASA-colorized image? No! This one did I colorize with red set to 100%, green to 75% and blue to 50%	Original NASA Picture from Pathfinder courtesy of JPL/NASA/Caltech. Why shows this little and for scientists maybe unimportant image this earth-like colors? It was taken on Sol 30, the last day of the planned schedule. After Sol 30, there was the extended mission. Did it leaked through accidently? See the same earth-like colors in a view from space on this page	Original NASA Picture from Pathfinder courtesy of JPL/NASA/Caltech. The same image was presented on Sol35 again. This time it is tinted red.

Pathfinder color pictures from: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/
Raw Pathfinder-IMP data from: http://www-pdsimage.jpl.nasa.gov/PDS/public/MPF/

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