Viking Mars Lander Photo Color-Altering Revealed From Kim Burrafato From S-P & M-M Sirag 4-26-00

http://www.sightings.com/general/color.htm

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I recently listened to a RealAudio interview from the Laura Lee Show archive that was done last July. The guests were Dr. Gil Levin (PI for the Labeled Release experiment on the Viking landers) and his son, Ron, who is a physicist at MIT. I'm sure you're all familiar with Dr. Gil Levin's story, but his son described something that I had never heard before:

Ron said that he was a 20-year old grad student and was at JPL when the first color images came in from the lander. He said those original images showed a blue sky and rocks with greenish patches on them, and that the Viking imaging team quickly adjusted the images so that the sky and the rocks all had the reddish color we're familiar with. Levin made it clear that there was no scientific justification for these "adjustments", and he speculated that the color was changed because the planetary scientists took a dim view of the greenish patches on the rocks, which suggested some primitive form of plant life might be growing right on the surface. This story sounded like one of those tall tales, except for the person who was telling it. Ron Levin is a physicist at MIT who co-authored his father's recent paper on the LR experiment and liquid water on Mars. He's not one of those anomymous "sources" that are responsible for most of the wild stories, so I took his allegations seriously enough to find out more about the original Viking images.

The first images released to the media on the day of the Viking 1 landing did, in fact, show a blue sky, but the later ones showed a red sky. There are several "authoritative" explanations of what happened, one involving color filters that were passing "out of band" light, making the images come out too blue. (Malin says this on one of his web pages). This doesn't sound plausible to me, since I would think they certainly would have noticed any major problem with the filters in the exhaustive preflight testing of the hardware.

COMPLETE ARTICLE AT SIGHTINGS WEBSITE: http://www.sightings.com/general/color.htm