Alien Anomalies

Hi guys,

don't jump to a shadow...

The key of the "obfuscation" explored you are the resolution and the field of view of the hazcam.
Consider that the resolution of the hazcam is the lowest of the MER cam's, it is 2.1 mrad/pixel that means  2.1mm/pixel in 1 m distance. (the pancam resolution is 0.28mm/pixel in 1 m)
Its field of view is 124 degrees (!) which is very large and it means a serious barrel distortion.
So the hazcam images are not appropriate to analysis. My opinion is that the "obfuscation" is only a small sand-patch nothing else.
Look the full-color pancam image of this site (captured on Sol38):



You can see that its a usual martian surface form. I have cropped the area of "obfuscation" and I have enlightened it:



It is visible that there is no obfuscation here, but the hazcam resolution and distortion have played with our eyes.

q- this is my assessment - generally:

1.  The pds img - nasaview extracted gif has all of the detail.
2.  The pds jpeg browse images have applied a noise reduction filter that removes a lot of noise, and with it, some detail.
3.  The jpl jpeg images have applied a noise filter, and have also auto equalized the image - the noise filter removes a lot of noise and some detail, and the auto equalizer creates extreme whites and blacks - and in those area no detail can be seen at all.

In addition, your program is doing a great job picking up details that I can't get with a conventional program.  Contrast adjustment - and equalization adjustment do stretch those bands - but less predictably or controllably than your program.

I am not completely convinced this is a smudge - though that was my initial impression.  You can see this same darkness between all of the rocks in the general area. 

However, this area is different in that it has that sharply defined triangular area that seems to cover two corners of the rock.  In addition, there appear to be lumps underneath the dark color here, which have dimension.  One would think that any lump - or rock - would not take on the same exact color as the soil.  However, in the bug example, what if a bug was naturally camoflauged to its surroundings? - in that case we would expect the soil and lump to have the same color.

This is a truly remarkable little spot we are exploring.

For me, this all leads to the question - what if NASA found a live bug moving around between the rocks on Mars?  We see over and over again, skeptics claiming that NASA would announce this to the world, and their budget would explode.

However, I find that claim dubious.

NASA's budget may well increase.  However, NASA doesn't drive its own agenda any more than the Energy commission drives its own agenda.  Every federal agency is driven by outside interests.  In the case of the Energy commission, the oil industry dictates that agenda.  In the case of NASA, we can list the major corporations that drive its agenda - the Boeings, etc. that create the hardware and software for NASA projects.

Those corporations have tons of money tied up in hardware that will be going up for the next few decades.  That hardware is designed to take small steps in the discovery process - not giant leaps.  A giant leap in the discovery process could cause NASA to scrap untold billions of dollars in projects and hardware that is being developed in favor of something else for which these companies may or may not get the contract.  It is no conspiracy theory to think that money drives the agendas of federal agencies.  That is just simple fact.

That said, the simple discovery of a living bug - during the "follow the water missions" would be a major disaster for these mega-corporations whose budgets are tied up in getting federal money from NASA.

Yes- some may recover in the long run - if - they get the contracts for further missions.  But it means untold billions lost in projects they have already developed - and which are waiting in the warehouse for a rocket launch.

I agree with you Marsrocks, if you use the GIF from the PDS, there is no likeness at all.

However, the normal jpg we see at marsrover site is the best - as far as it has some greys left in it.

The pds browse directory .img.jpg version appears to be more damaged than the marsrover one, and the pds .img version appears to have a grey piece of ground from somewhere else covering the whole area. I do not think the pds .img grey area is the real thing at all.

So basically, as I said in the first post, the JPG image from the marsrover site has the most shadowey greys behind the smudging - as far as I can tell.
This is the one I used

Marsrocks, I see you have used the .img GIF image as the grey smudge has a ground-like appearance in your photo above.(Why would it be necessary to smudge the ground if there was nothing there but normal ground?). I used NasaView to extract the GIF from the .img file downloaded from the PDS. PDS data directory Sol 37 - was that what you wanted, or do you want a link to the GIF itself, which is on my machine?

What are the chances of two complex shapes being the same? Pretty low I suspect.

The technical bit (you can stop reading here!)

The process I used was a PHP program I have written which basically increases the distance between grey values in certain areas. This allows me to 'see' something in the shadows which normally appears just black. So for example grey values of 1 2 3 4 5, after being processed might end up with 4 in between each value and the next rather than just 1. (1,5,9,13,17 etc) This makes the definition between pixels easier to see, but gets too bright very quickly and you lose some top white detail in your image. I also shift the base grey value up so that values of 1 onwards now start at 11 I think, I cannot remember what the shift is. This whole process is only useful in the darker areas (where the grey value is very low) obviously. Making a picture brighter probably raises all the grey values all together by the same amount, which is not particularly useful in these cases.

Maybe in Photoshop you can mask the area and just lighten that area, but it still does not increase the distance betwwen pixelvalues. Maybe there is a plugin that does that?

q, I do think you're reaching on this one.

However, I think there is something in that smudged spot.

Working on your first image - and working a fade - it looks like two or three bugs in the spots where your arrows are pointing:  Look - rounded dimensional objects appear with what look like little legs coming out:



By the way, q - do you have a link to the gif you pulled?  Also, what did you do with it - I can't get this detail from the pds jpegs I linked.

So, from the comments, I guess that you are all being tactful and think I am stretching the
link between the alien images and what is hidden, huh?

I just feel that it is rather a strange coincidence that the outlines are the same shape.
After all, it could be any shape that appeared when I did the processing, but it was
the same one (I reckon), but maybe others cannot see the similarities that I can.

I often look at an image and wonder what the poster sees in the photo that I cannot 'see'.

Both the disk-shaped impressions in the rocks have a 'core' or central depression which
suggests to me that it may be a fossilised plant of some kind. Yes, I hadn't noticed those.

Take a look at this:

Opportunity sol 37:

JPL links:

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/a....38P1214L0M1.JPG

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/a....38P1214R0M1.JPG

PDS links:

http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mer....14l0m1.img. jpg

http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mer....14r0m1.img. jpg



Note the disc shaped fossil impressions(?) in the rocks - marked in yellow:





(Image is an animation from the pds images - enlarged to 200dpi, and localized automatic level equalization applied).