MarsBlog.net

TODAY’S THEMIS IMAGE: Low Sun angle over the northern plains:

This image of the northern plains of Mars shows a surface texture of hundreds of small mounds and numerous small impact craters. The THEMIS imaging team is taking advantage of the late afternoon sun illumination to image places like this where the surface may contain small scale features that are “washed-out” by higher illumination angles. As the sun dips towards the horizon (to the left side of the image), shadows are cast. The length of the shadows can be used to estimate the height of the feature casting them – or the depth of the crater that contains the shadow. In this image the craters – even very small ones – are now partially filled by shadow making it very easy to identify them. The small bumps are not casting shadows yet, but are easily seen. These small bumps were not easily identified when the sun angle was higher (earlier in the afternoon). As this image shows, late afternoon sun illumination is wonderful for making small scale morphologic features visible.

EVIDENCE? Okay, I promise, no more Cydonia crap…but here’s the evidence that Hoagland was apparently referring to.

Pixellation and wishful thinking.

JUST PLAIN SAD: I promised myself when I started this weblog that I wouldn’t touch ‘Mars Face’ issues. But I just can’t let this site go without comment.

Yes, they’ve got a pretty layout. Yes, they do a better job of ferreting out mainstream Mars-related news than I do. But no matter how pretty or informative their site is, they throw away all their credibility by giving uncritical (indeed, supportive) coverage to the discredited “Mars Face” nonsense and the associated conspiracy theories.

In the interest of fairness, I decided to read some of what they bill as new evidence and proof of a NASA coverup, to see if maybe they had (however remote the possibility) uncovered something interesting and new…and who knows, maybe even incriminating.

And what I got was this. It’s a press release documenting Richard Hoagland’s new “evidence” of “artificial structures” on Mars, and NASA’s coverup of same. The supposed evidence consists of a THEMIS infrared image of Cydonia, which Hoagland’s outfit (the Enterprise Mission…ho-kay) downloaded from the public archive at ASU and ran through image analysis software, discovering curious details which no one else had seen. However, no one else could replicate the analysis from the data available from the same source. (Note that ASU is also the source of the THEMIS images I link to here daily.)

This is where the “coverup” and conspiracy theory come into play.

According to the Hoagland bunch, they were given the “real” dataset, while a modified dataset was placed in the public archive at ASU. How was this done, if they downloaded the data from the same source as everyone else? Simple: a “Deep Throat” tipped them off to the image, and when one of their people went to the ASU site to download it, they were surreptitiously redirected to an exact duplicate of the site where the “real” data was substituted for the NASA “forgery” available at the real ASU site:

Hoagland and his team obtained their version of the daytime IR data from the same THEMIS website as the current official version of that data. The “real” data was downloaded by Keith Laney, an independent image processing specialist who is currently supplying imaging enhancements for NASA-Ames’ MOC MER2003 Landing Sites Project and the NASA ?Marsoweb Program, on July the 25th, 2002 at 10:27 PM EDT. Laney considers it a possibility that he may have been redirected to a site that looked exactly like the official THEMIS website, when he went to download the image on the 25th.

Adding to the mystery is the fact that Laney was encouraged to go to the site after he had criticized the quality of the “official” data in The Enterprise Mission’s electronic Conference room. The person doing the most encouragement was Noel Gorelick — Manager of Arizona State University?s Mars Computation Center, and the person responsible for creating and posting the official NASA IR Cydonia composite images on the THEMIS web site in the first place. “I would not have bothered to revisit the THEMIS Cydonia image again, if it were not for Mr. Gorelick forcefully encouraging me to do so in several e-mail exchanges and sequential posts,” Laney stated.

Adding a strange twist to the whole mystery, is the fact that Gorelick chose the nickname “Bamf” for posting in the Enterprise Conference — a slang computer term for ?redirecting someone to a fake website or server,? as his identifier in the Enterprise Conference. “I tend to think ‘Bamf’ Bamfed me to the real data,” Laney said.

My, how baroque.

It’s not clear how they realized that there were two different datasets, but upon making this discovery they only naturally set about determining which of the two was the unadulterated one. And, lo and behold, it was the one to which they had been directed! (Come on, don’t tell me you didn’t see that coming.) There follows the usual allegations of a coverup and call for an official investigation and all the usual “I found a conspiracy!” press release boilerplate. But I think Hoagland’s own words give the game away:

“If we had published our results when we originally planned, two weeks ago, before we discovered the different datasets, no imaging professional would have been able to duplicate our results with the ‘official’ version on the THEMIS website.”

“Despite the fact that the results now prove beyond any doubt that there are artificial structures at Cydonia, no one would have been able to replicate them,” he said. It would have been a modern version of the ‘cold fusion’ debate.”

Of course, the comparison to cold fusion is a bit of a conceit, but the point here is that he fully admits that no one would have taken his revelations seriously had the purported discrepancy not turned up…and there it was.

“Fishy” doesn’t begin to describe it. But “laughable” does. With evidence like this, one has to wonder at the gullibility of those who take it all seriously.

Personally, I’m fascinated by the possibility of structures and even whole cities on Mars — I hope someday we’ll be able to go there and build them.

TODAY’S THEMIS IMAGE: Tithonium Chasma, in Valles Marineris:

This image covers part of Tithonium Chasma, which is part of the Valles Marineris system of canyons that stretch for thousands of kilometers. The contrast between dark sandy surfaces covered by dunes and bright dusty surfaces with a rather uniform appearance is clearly visible in the bottom half of the image. Small cut channels and flat-topped buttes, representing an erosional remnant of a resistant layer of rock, are also observed and covered by dust. In the top half of the image, ridgelines are observed in the canyon walls with small dark streaks trailing downslope; these streaks suggest that the sediments covering this area occasionally become unstable and slide.

A BIT WOBBLY: Scientists studying MGS data suspect that axial and orbital instabilities on Mars result in periodic “ice ages” analogous to those on Earth.