1993 vs 2013

replace your carpet

The OP is correct in saying that NASA will monkey with their photos like nobody’s business. But this photo is not an accurate depiction of what Mars looks like. The person who stitched this together used the unprocessed jpeg files from the rover’s mastcam.

The mast camera on the rover is only 2 megapixels and has technology that is several years old. It was the most prudent choice for this mission, but it is not actually a wonderful camera. If you look at the histogram of the photos it takes. all of the tones are scrunched together in a small area. There are no deep blacks, no bright whites. Everything is a bit dull. Whereas the human eye can see almost twice the dynamic range of even the best cameras available. So you would actually need to boost the contrast a bit.

So what would Mars look like at this time of day in this location? I downloaded the original files myself and processed them properly to find out.

[high res]

The top is the unprocessed version from above and the bottom is my edit which has the proper amount of contrast added. Since this is mid day sunlight, the colors do look a little washed out. I imagine Mars looks a lot more red during sunrise and twilight.

And just for fun, I also did a crazy “NASA style” edit.

[hi res]

If I were to guess, I’d say NASA does this because impressive, grandiose images help inspire politicians to give them funding. If you thrill them with the cosmos, perhaps they will be more prone to bankroll exploration.

If that is what it takes, NASA can certainly count on me to overprocess photos for them.

As cool as this rover is… we should be the ones on Mars right now.