Nasa denies ‘sexing up’ images of Red Planet

American space scientists have been forced to defend themselves amid allegations that they ‘sexed up’ images of Mars.

The claim is that Nasa experts ‘tweaked’ pictures sent back by the two Mars rovers to ensure the Red Planet lived up to its reputation.

Ordinary-looking brown scenery was digitally altered to make it redder, it is alleged.

A more extreme version of the conspiracy theory says Nasa doctored the colours to hide evidence of life, such as green patches, New Scientist magazine reported.

The claims arise because of the strange appearance of certain colours seen on the rover spacecraft.

This was due to the photos being taken through green, blue and infrared -rather than red -filters, said Nasa.

When infrared images were printed as red, the results were fairly accurate but with some glaring exceptions. Blue and green, found on the spacecraft but nowhere on the Martian surface, looked especially odd.

Blue came out as deep burgundy or pink, while green ended up as a kind of mustard.

Nasa said it used infrared filters because they provided better information for geologists, helping to distinguish rock types. In reality the redness of the Martian surface depended greatly on its sky.

‘Because of the reddish dust that is always in the air, the light falling on the surface of Mars is red to begin with; the effect is likely to be rather like terrestrial lighting close to sunset, when hills take on a pink or magenta hue,’ said New Scientist. The quality of the Martian red light varied with the level of dust as well as the time of day.

Initial images from the two Viking probes which landed on Mars in 1975 were far too red, according to Nasa.

Compared with them, even the early rover images were much closer to reality.

Earlier, Nasa scientists admitted they were getting paranoid over the state of their two Martian rovers which have both developed hiccups.

The Opportunity rover, which landed on the red plant at the weekend, has developed a small, 15 watt, power loss that is worrying the US space agency.

It also began unfolding and successfully deployed its highgain antenna, used to communicate directly with Earth.

Opportunity’s twin, Spirit, continued to convalesce, 6,600 miles away on Mars. Engineers received additional data from the ailing rover that is furthering their quest to understand computer problems that last week brought its science work to a grinding halt.

Engineers believe Spirit does not have sufficient randomaccess memory to manage all the files in its flash memory.

Scientists were looking forward to doing further analysis on the half-inch thick layers evident in images of Martian rocks sent back by Opportunity.