What's Up With the Colors on Mars?

At least some of what NASA has shown us is bogus. Photos don't lie - but they can be misleading...

Conspiracy theories are actually okay. However, buying into them outright is for the weak-minded, and rejecting them offhand is for the closed-minded. Hard facts, strong evidence, good research, and critical thinking provide the path forward to properly accepting or rejecting any interesting theories, whether of the conspiracy or of the scientific type. Having said all that, let's take a look at one of my favorite conspiracy theories about Mars.

Spirit Rover Phones Home

Back in 2004, NASA released a fascinating panoramic photograph from the Spirit Rover, an image processed by Cornell University. The rocks are rusty red, the sky is dusty red, and everything looks very "Mars like". It's actually an awesome image. The problem is the colors are all wrong! Let me explain this claim, and back it with hard evidence.

You can download this panorama for yourself, in very high resolution, from NASA at this link: https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA05015

Notice near the bottom center of the image is the "Pancam Calibration Target", used to calibrate images for Sun angles and for colors, using the four color chips located at each of its corners. The original image is very large, allowing us to zoom in and crop to see this calibration target in much better detail, as shown here.

This is actually a nice clean image from Mars of the calibration target. Dust builds up quickly, as explained in the following image of this same calibration target on the Spirit rover sent back at a later time from the Mars environment.

Here's an even better photograph of this calibration target, taken here on Earth and used to demonstrate how the color chips allow adjusting colors accurately, whether the Sun is up high and bright, or low in the sky and dim.

Take a close look at the blue color chip in the bottom, right corner, and at the tape of the same color wrapped around the wires in the upper right part of the photograph. Compare these details with the color chips and wire tape in the panorama. The chip and the tape are red in the panorama, and blue in all other photographs. Houston, we have a problem here. Blue is not red. There's no way around it. Something is seriously out of whack!

Also notice that the green color chip in the upper left corner is completely invisible in the panorama.

Is There a Conspiracy Here?

All this means the sky and rocks might be more blue instead of red, and no lichens, moss, critters, or minerals will show up in green anywhere in the panorama. That's the conspiracy theory side of things. It's also quite possible the fine folks at Cornell simply mixed and matched the color channels of the original raw image until the rocks and sky looked really cool and appropriate for public consumption. Let's investigate a little deeper.

Python to the Rescue

My passion is Python programming, and this image presents an ideal opportunity to show how easy it is to process pixels in photographs. The following short program, named color_swap.py, loads the panoramic image and processes the colors in each pixel. (If you process the extra large version of this image, note that it can take a while to complete. This program stresses simplicity over efficiency.)

# color_swap.py

from PIL import Image 
import numpy as np 

img_file = "PIA05015.jpg"

# Load and reshape the image file
img = np.array(Image.open(img_file))
shp = img.shape

# Swap red, blue bytes
for x in range(shp[0]):
    for y in range(shp[1]):
        r = float(img[x][y][0])
        g = float(img[x][y][1])
        b = float(img[x][y][2])
        r, b = b, r    # Process color bytes here
        img[x][y][0] = int(r)
        img[x][y][1] = int(g)
        img[x][y][2] = int(b)

# Output results to new image file
imgout = Image.fromarray(img)
imgout.save("PIA05015_new.jpg")

The r, g, b variables in the middle of the nested loops provides the place to do any pixel color processing you might care to try. As shown, the red and blue bytes are swapped, and the green byte is left alone. The result of the red and blue swap is interesting, but alas, the results are bizarre and inconclusive.

I did try a lot of other experiments with the three color bytes, but nothing really improved on the original image. This blue image does change the blue chip to blue in the calibration target, but there's basically no red left on Mars when we do this, resulting in an image that looks considerably more unreal than the original.

An Official Explanation

As I mentioned earlier, conspiracy theories should be thoroughly vetted before reaching any conclusions. I wrote to the researchers at Cornell a few years ago, and got a somewhat reasonable, yet frustrating, explanation for the colors in the panorama.

It turns out that some of the Spirit rover's imaging sensors and filters processed light in the infrared and other parts of the spectrum normally unavailable to the human eye. In this case, the sensors at the high frequency end of the light spectrum, including blue and some green, were missing, whereas a channel of infra-red, below the threshold of the human eye, was included. The blue mineral color chip reflected infra-red effectively, so it glowed brightly at those frequencies. The image was processed by shifting the infra-red up into the visible red part of the spectrum. The researchers told me the image was adjusted to what they felt should be fairly accurate, human-eye-visible colors for the rocks and the sky on Mars.

Conclusions

Okay, so they likely tried to make the colors right, shifting the invisible infra-red frequencies up into the visible red region, and this was likely not done for any deep conspiracy reasons. Still, what we see in the photo is really not what we'd see if we were standing there. That blue chip should actually look blue, and so would any blue rocks, let alone issues with any green chlorophyll or green rocks. So, I still think my question is valid... What's up with the colors on Mars?

Note: I'm still trying to find NASA images from more recent rovers, such as Perseverance, where the calibration target is visible and clean enough to verify the colors. If anyone finds any, please share!

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