NASA fudging data?
My friend Charles Shults has been poring over NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rover photographs since February; he has made a rock-solid case for the presence of fossils there, by the billions. Lately, he has been looking at some of the photographs of the sky on Mars and has come to the startling conclusion that NASA is editing the images using simple graphics software, and has been deliberately colorizing the skies to make them appear reddish - in fact, the Martian sky is a greyish blue.
Whatever could possess those at NASA with access to the raw data to make these changes? And not only that, but to make their edits obvious? Is somebody Simon Jestering NASA from within? Or is this editing an official policy of NASA? and if it is official policy, why?
One thing is certain: NASA receives its funding from the American people. If NASA cannot be trusted to give accurate data, or if they are editing it in such a way as to give a false impression of the results, then Americans are not getting good value for their money.
When faced with a choice between incompetence and conspiracy to explain the dubious actions of an agency like NASA, incompetence is the case 99% of the time. However, whether the edits of the images are due to incompetence or policy, neither choice reflects well upon NASA.
It is time for NASA to come clean. If they are intentionally misleading the public (you know, the ones who pay their salaries) then fraud charges are warranted, starting with Sean O'Keefe and going right on down the line. If the edits are the result of incompetence (ie poor security), then there ought to be mass firings in their IT department.
2 comments:
You're serious? I see pictures of rock blobs called "fossils" and complaints that press release Mars pictures aren't "true color" - which is essentially impossible. Almost all pictures from probes, landers, the Hubble telescope, etc. are not even close to what the human eye would see. Even a regular TV camera doesn't pick things up quite the way a human eye does, but here, the filters are distinctly different. NASA is far more interested in getting information than human accurate pictures, and it is common for the colors, contrast, etc. to be distinctly off. Further, this is regarding press release pictures, not the source data - different pictures from the same data will have different colors, contrasts, etc. depending on what they are interested in.
Take this over to badastronomy.com. There are folks there that can go into great detail on camera and processing specifics.
Why would NASA hide evidence for life on MARS, when a reasonable person would think they would love to find exactly that? The obvious answer is that they aren't, and this fellow is coming to a flawed conclusion based on extremely flimsy arguments.
Hey anonymous dude, look at the evidence for yourself. The photoediting being done is awkward and even amateurish. There's even a Kilroy on the sky in one shot.
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