perfidy

The New York Times has uncovered compelling evidence that NASA has been tampering with the color of photos beamed from Mars, and today published a shocking exposee of mechanical malfeasance , deliberate deception, and sloppy science.

[D]id NASA fiddle with the [color images from Mars] to make [them] look that red? As Mars buffs have pointed out in recent weeks on Web sites like Slashdot.org, a closer look reveals that parts of the rover itself, in the foreground, are oddly garish. Even the color chips placed on the rover to calibrate the color photographs had shifted. What should be bright blue is instead bright pink; what should be bright green is brown. . . .

What was going on? On Jan. 31, during a lull in the control room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jason Soderblom, a graduate student at Cornell who is a member of the science team, gave a talk explaining the odd Martian colors. . . .

[For the rover to] produce a color photograph, the rover's panoramic camera takes three black-and-white images of a scene, once with a red filter, once with a green filter and once with a blue filter. Each is then tinted with the color of the filter, and the three are combined into a color image.

In assembling the Spirit photographs, however, the scientists used an image taken with an infrared filter, not the red filter. Some blue pigments like the cobalt in the rover color chip also emit this longer-wavelength light, which is not visible to the human eye. . . .

For the scientists, there are good reasons to focus on infrared colors rather than the visible red. "Iron dominates mineral color in the visible, and it causes everything to have shades of red," Mr. Soderblom said.

With the infrared filter, the different iron minerals emit different colors, and the camera can better differentiate between them. "We're trying to identify the minerals in the scene, and the way we're doing this is with subtle differences," Mr. Soderblom said. . . .

Still, there was no reason for the Spirit to see pink on Mars. When producing the panorama, the camera also used the red filter.

"We just made a mistake," said Dr. James F. Bell III, the lead scientist for the camera. "It's really just a mess-up."

A mess-up? Or a cover-up? This administration will stop at nothing to obscure the truth, even blocking authenticity in the name of science. I tell you now, Magentagate will become the deciding factor in the 2004 Presidential elections.

What could they be hiding up there, New York Times? What, indeed? Better get on it.