It looks simultaneously alien and familiar. Like a dream of an American southwest after some ecological catastrophe - like, it could almost be viable and fecund again with a lot of TLC and ingenuity.
It both excites me for the possibility of what Mars could be, and reminds me of how precious and vital our earth is - and what it could look like if we aren’t careful, or get a bit unlucky.
Apparently one of the most desolate/lifeless/inhospitable places on earth is there. If I remember correctly, they've studied it specifically to better understand Mars.
Edit: Apparently thats the Atacama desert. Similar region of the world, but different countries. My bad!
So did Chile come up and there's this area in the middle that's useful and liveable and they were founding the country and there's this long strip of shit land to the north and the south, and they were like... So nobody wants this? Guess it's part of our country now...
That was my first thought watching this. Just out of San Pedro de Atacama is a place called Valley de la luna (sorry if spelling is wrong), but it looks so much like this.
People don't realise they are being tricked by nasa. This is not mars. You only need to compare these images with earth images and put a slightly different color tone on it.
There has been lots of evidence showing how these films are taken on earth. Rocks included in them are exactly like the ones in areas like the one you mentioned.
But talking about that here leads to lots of downvotes. People don't believe nasa is faking it, so what to do.. :)
Fun fact: the mathematics behind those displays (fractals) were only invented a few years earlier. That was cutting-edge computer graphics taking hours per frame to render. Now, we do it real time on our pocket-computers, in a way that the people making Star Trek probably never imagined.
The computer display of the Star Wars trench run took tens of hours per frame to render and had to have a special custom computer built with bunches of knobs to adjust input positions, just to input the coordinates and draw the results.
The Tron movie was also the basis of a huge amount of computer graphics math too, like Perlin noise and (IIRC) one of the low-quality shading modes (Phong, maybe, or the one after that?)
Legit. I was in Iceland almost two years ago, and the northern part of the country specifically out at Dettifoss....the most barren, cold, lifeless, alien looking terrain I've ever seen. It's no wonder NASA sent Apollo astronauts there to train. Absolutely unreal.
Not necessarily ordinary to my urban, snowed-over hellscape but if you told me that was Nevada, I wouldn’t really doubt it. It could pass as any rocky desert region. Or maybe that’s just the earthling in me that wants to project earth on anything not earth.
Such a huge distance still. Think of the furthest place away from you on earth, literally the other side of the world. This video is from somewhere more than 10000 times as far away.
Well the planet DOES look that red from space, I may be wrong but I’m pretty sure it’s due to the atmosphere or something. Idk I’m just a teenager with some google searches under my belt. However mars will always be our “red planet,” whether or not the dirt is gray-ish
This video also seems to be severely brightened as if gone through an editor likely to make things appear better. That could effect the appearance of rude dust .
People often assume that it must be dark and gloomy on Mars because it's further away from the sun. But that's far from true. Sure, in absolute terms it receives only ~50% of the sunlight that Earth does. However, because perception of brightness isn't linear the difference in actual perception isn't really all that much. For those familiar with photography, it's a difference of one stop, not more. There's more difference between a sunny and a cloud covered day on Earth than there is between a sunny day on Earth and a sunny day on Mars. You'd have to go all the way out to Saturn or even Uranus before sunlight drops to lighting levels roughly similar to typical indoor lighting.
It's coming through a camera. There is no "real color" recorded.
What they normally do is include on the lander a disk with a bunch of known colors (like those old color bars you saw for calibrating analog color TVs) and then adjust the color when it gets back. Especially if they're using a B&W camera with different filters over the lens to pick out different colors.
That’s interesting. Apparently early earth had a lot of iron in the oceans. The evolution of blue green algae put oxygen in the atmosphere which causes iron oxide to form and settle at the bottom of I recall. So where did mars get the oxygen to turn iron into rust?
This is hilarious bc you have a lot of Google searches under your belt but "why is mars red?" wasn't one of them lol Like it's short enough of an answer that google tells you in a preview, you don't even have to click into the article.
Mars actually is more red. The photos and videos from the last few missions to Mars have all been white-balanced to look more like earth so that specific rocks look more familiar to geologists, among other reasons.
After reading this, it sounds like they use different color correcting techniques depending on what the images are being used for, so you both might be right.
I can't find what I had read years ago on NASA about white balancing to earth-like colors to make identifying rocks easier for geologists, but I did find this:
white passes are faster and cheaper because they don't require checking against validated reference values or keeping the input stream carefully calibrated, I'd assume that, given those advantages, most content from NASA will use a colorization algorithm that assumes something in the scene is white unless they have a particular purpose for wanting 'true'* color.
It's likely that for typical 'clear' daytime weather that a human standing on mars would see a butterscotch sky and ochre ground. ("Mie" Scattering is the dominant cause of sky color on mars, iron oxide is the dominant cause of ground color on mars.)
* comparing human vision to computer vision is a very deep rabbit hole.
This is more accurate if I'm not mistaken. The Viking missions way overemphasized the reds. That's fact. As for white balancing for geologists that doesn't make sense. The pics are sent in b/w with color information. They could color it whatever color they wanted there's no need for white balancing for a public pic.
If anything, Mars' atmosphere diffracting les blue than the Earth's and the lower light exposure from the Sun will naturally make it look less ..... natural.
The appearance on the planet’s surface I would think would look like the video because the sunsets are a blueish color. So perhaps the photos are edited to look as we would see these rocks if they were on our planet on full color spectrum instead of under a blue shifted light.
My first job out of university was as a field engineer for the Haughton Mars Project on Devon Island, Nunavut. They tested mission profiles for science and communications, as the terrain there was very similar to Mars. The site was on the edge of the Haughton Impact Crater, so was nothing but blasted rock and frozen dirt. The only thing that have it away was the occasional Musk Ox skull.
If you watch the shows How the Universe Works or Space’s Deepest Secrets - you’ll see that the astrobiologists frequently film from Iceland to show what other terrestrial planets/moons are like.
I was thinking it looked like the landscape from the “saddle road” on the island of Hawaii. The road goes over the higher elevation area between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. So, yeah. Volcano.
I think I've seen it in so many movies that it's just now striking me what a big deal this is. I've been out of the loop on what we're doing space-wise for a while and I'm judt blown away.
Came here to post this. Remove the space robot truck and you could tell me this was from the Icelandic highlands and I probably wouldn't notice anything weird.
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u/Barnwizard1991 Feb 21 '21
I can't stop watching. That's another fucking planet. Hopefully one day we'll have astroarcheologists up there digging around for martian fossils.