Houston Chronicle: NASA photo captures strange bright light coming out of Mars

[swoods_blue]

Here's a story that requires some sort of scientific explanation:

Houston Chronicle: NASA photo captures strange bright light coming out of Mars

The story very matter-of-factly states:

"A NASA camera on Mars has captured what appears to be artificial light emanating outward from the planet's surface."

The Chronicle story (unfortunately buried in the "Strange & weird" section next to bits about 2-legged dogs and C-sections performed on dead porcupines) credits a UFO site for the discovery. You have to track back to UFO Sightings Daily to find the URL for the original image file on the JPL/NASA site. But it's there. And there really is a bright light on the horizon in the image.

A light in a picture doesn't mean life on Mars or alien activity, but it is anomalous and requires an explanation. It shouldn't be there. So it's a shame that this scientific data ended up buried in the "Strange" section, where readers have permission to ignore it totally, if it shakes them up too much.

[Atlas]

I posted this on another thread:

Posted by buares (here)

Posted by giovonni (here)
where there's light there's ____ ?



Mysterous light beams from Mars Surface In NASA Photo ?

Posted by Phage
Can anyone explain why it does not appear in the image taken by the left NAVCAM at the same time? (source)

These things do happen:

[swoods_blue]

Update:

NBCNews.com (article here) has the following explanation:

"Doug Ellison, an imaging guru who happens to work at JPL, quickly told me in a Twitter update that the bright spot is due to a "cosmic ray hit" affecting the rover. (Later: The Surrey Space Center's Chris Bridges agrees.)"

Plausible. But NBCNews.com also noted in their report:

"A picture taken by the right navcam on the day before shows a similar bright speck, seen from a slightly different perspective. The only problem is that the navigation camera is a stereo system, and the left-hand navcam doesn't show the bright spots on either day."

Here are the two images in question:

(Image 1)
(Image 2)

So, you have two independent images showing a bright speck EXACTLY on the horizon in the same general area, from two different perspectives. I totally understand how a cosmic ray hit could cause a pixel drop-out in an image. I'm not so convinced that 2 separate cosmic ray hits could cause two separate pixel drop-outs on the horizon of the same landscape in the same location 1 day apart. A plausible 1-off becomes exceedingly implausible when both "cosmic ray hits" land exactly on the same mid-distance horizon, in front of the mountain range.

[Matt P]

I don't know about you guys but I don't trust ANYTHING that comes out of NASA. Hard to have a legitimate debate about something they publish.
NASA is a military agency, not a scientific one.
You've got filters on the cameras that don't show the real color of Mars.
For all we know, this might not even BE Mars. That thing that looks like a rocket could be a rip in the backdrop material.
This may be legit but I look at NASA the way I look at the mainstream corporate "news." Once you've been caught lying so many times, I leave you behind and don't pay attention anymore.

Matt

[edit: not to mention, there is no such thing as an untouched, originally released photo from NASA. If these pictures were downloaded directly from a rover to the public, we could intelligently debate it. But this never happens. All photos are vetted first and then released and who knows what is done to them before]

[Atlas]

I just made a copy of the tweets between journalist Alan Boyle and Doug Ellison:

[swoods_blue]

Ok, now let's talk about the grooves (aka "tracks"?) in the soil in "Image 2" I posted above. They don't look like ROVER tracks, do they?

[Atlas]

Try this:

This content is NOT on the Avalon server. Source of content is: http://blog.vitotechnology.com/?p=6787#post-6787

This content is NOT on the Avalon server. Source of content is: http://blog.vitotechnology.com/?p=6787#post-6787

[swoods_blue]

To me, the idea of cracks filled by the wind doesn't convincingly explain the question of the accumulation of rows of small stones alongside these grooves. If, as suggested, this is simply an illusion, it is a very convincing illusion. There are no bedrock edges visible, and they _look_ like grooves created by an object tilling the shallow sand and gravel there. That's just my subjective impression. I'm not a geologist or photo analyst, but what it really looks just exactly like, to me, is taking a stick and dragging it through the soil.

It's also possible that two separate cosmic ray strikes hit the right-side camera right at the horizon line on subsequent days, making flashes which appear above, but not below the horizon, and which have a gradient from bright at the "ground" level and fading as it goes up. Yes, that radical phenomenon COULD happen two days in a row to the same camera on the same rover in the same spot in the same landscape. But now we're talking odds that are, uh, astronomical.

[swoods_blue]

Aware that having flashes on two separate images taken a day apart casts doubt on the "cosmic ray" hypothesis, NASA has improved upon its explanation for the light seen in two images taken by the Curiousity rover's right nav cam.

Now their folks say it could be a "glinty rock" or a bit of light intruding through the camera casing onto the CCD.

Christian Science Monitor -- Light on Mars: What's that speck of light doing? (+video)

I would only say that the glinty rock hypothesis is a significant walk-back from saying via Twitter, "it's an imaging articfact and not a real 'thing' in the terrain. Period."

A version of the "glinty rock" hypothesis had occurred to me, too.

Like maybe a monolith catching the sun

[Atlas]

"We think it's either a vent-hole light leak or a glinty rock," says Justin Maki, an imaging scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who is the lead for the engineering cameras on Curiosity.

Interesting. It can't be a glinty rock else we would see it on the other camera. I guess their best bet is the light leak...

As for the tracks, I highly doubt there are martian snakes just living there but who knows. The geological explanation seems to fit somewhat...

[swoods_blue]

Very interesting puzzling over this mystery with you buares. We may not get our answer anytime soon, but let's file it away and remember this, eh?

[swoods_blue]

Here's another data point from CNN (my, my, isn't this story getting a lot of coverage?)

CNN --- Curiosity piqued as 'bright spot' lights up Martian surface

A few pictures -- taken April 2 and 3 -- show the bright spots. These were taken with the rover's "right-eye camera," yet others that were shot within a second from the "left-eye" camera don't show the same, explains Guy Webster, a spokesman with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

So in the Twitter exchange buares posted above, Doug Ellison said the pics were taken "at the exact same moment." But CNN's description says "within a second", which seems to imply the twin cams' shutters were opened independently, one after the other. In other words, not at the exact same moment.

I'm not trying to be cute here, at all. In terms of a glint or flash of light, a second is an eternity. It makes a big difference here in trying to understand whether this is, broadly speaking A) A camera artifact or B) a real flash of light.

In either case, we want to understand what caused the flash -- this is very important raw data that needs to be explored. If it's A) we need to understand how the phenomenon works, and why the flashes appeared at the horizon both times (random or not?). And if it's B) then whoa, nelly have we got ourselves a fascinating opportunity to learn more.

A) or B) makes a huge difference. NASA's approach seems to be, "It doesn't matter if it's really there or not, because it's not interesting."

[Atlas]

NASA's report, April 08, 2014:

Images taken by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover on April 2 and April 3 include bright spots, which might be due to the sun glinting off a rock or cosmic rays striking the camera's detector.

The image from April 3, from Curiosity's Navigation Camera, is online at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/...hp?id=PIA18077

The rover took the image just after arriving at a waypoint called "the Kimberley." The bright spot appears on a horizon, in the same west-northwest direction from the rover as the afternoon sun.

"In the thousands of images we've received from Curiosity, we see ones with bright spots nearly every week," said Justin Maki of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., leader of the team that built and operates the Navigation Camera. "These can be caused by cosmic-ray hits or sunlight glinting from rock surfaces, as the most likely explanations."

If the bright spots in the April 2 and April 3 images are from a glinting rock, the directions of the spots from the rover suggest the rock could be on a ridge about 175 yards (160 meters) from the rover's April 3 location.

The bright spots appear in images from the right-eye camera of the stereo Navcam, but not in images taken within one second of those by the left-eye camera. Maki said, "Normally we can quickly identify the likely source of a bright spot in an image based on whether or not it occurs in both images of a stereo pair. In this case, it's not as straightforward because of a blocked view from the second camera on the first day."

At the Kimberley and, later, at outcrops on the slope of Mount Sharp inside Gale Crater, researchers plan to use Curiosity's science instruments to learn more about habitable past conditions and environmental changes.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The project designed and built the project's Curiosity rover and operates it on Mars.

For more information about Curiosity, visit http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl , http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/. You can follow the mission on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity.

Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov