http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001305/
'The zoomed-in view of the image on the Internet also makes it very difficult to see that Bigfoot is really not very big. There's a neat tool that another rover fan, "Algorimancer," has written that allows you to use the rovers' binocular vision to estimate the distance to and size of objects visible in their images. Using AlgorimancerPG, you can determine that our little "Bigfoot" is actually less than five meters from the rover, so can be no more than about 6 centimeters tall. I put an anaglyph together, so if you have 3D glasses you, too, can take advantage of Spirit's binocular vision. For myself, I can't actually quite figure out what the blob actually is; there's a lot of weirdly weathered rock around Spirit's landing site, where sand-filled winds have had billions of years to carve rocks into fantastic shapes.'
And pay keen attention to this paragraph: 'The color photo of Bigfoot, in all its graininess, seems like a snapshot that Spirit took with the color camera on its mobile phone, catching a space alien visitor in motion as it dashed across the crater floor. It's easy to forget that color images from space are almost never taken all at once, in one snapshot. Nearly all cameras sent to space have monochrome detectors. To obtain color images, they have to take a photo of the same spot at least three times, each time with a different-color filter placed in front of the lens. In this case, Spirit took aim at that particular spot first with blue filters over both its left and right eyes. A minute later, having saved the first files to memory, it rotated the left-eye filter wheel to place an infrared filter over its left eye, and shot the scene again, and saved that image to memory. Then, about half a minute later, it was ready to shoot the scene a third time, with a green filter over its eye. Do you see what I'm getting at here? That weird little twisty piece of dark rock that looks like a humanoid figure stood perfectly still while the three images were taken, between 11:58:53 and 12:00:13 local time at Spirit's landing site. OK, the conspiracy theorist might say; it's cold on Mars, maybe our Martian Bigfoot is very slow-moving in that cold. Well, it turns out that this isn't the only time that Spirit spotted the funny rock. Before Spirit spends the time taking the numerous images required for a Pancam panorama (this particular panorama took 154 images, four each from 36 different pointings), the rover usually takes a quick-and-dirty version of the same panorama through its lower-resolution Navigation Cameras. The Navcam version of the panorama was captured fully three days earlier than the Pancam version and you can see that Bigfoot is in exactly the same position on sol 1,364 as it was on sol 1,367. Here's all the pictures I dug up, with help from the folks at unmannedspaceflight.com and especially Mike Howard's Midnight Mars Browser.'
Oh, and the original full panorama: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10214.jpg
The supossed 'lifeform' is in the bottom left of the picture, about 15 feet away from the rover.
24-Jan-2008
24-Jan-2008
