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Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Ice water evaporating on the surface of Mars

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Original - First direct proof of water ice on the surface of Mars. These color image captured in 2008 by the Phoenix probe. The lower left corner of the two images is enlarged in the top right corner of each image, showing ice sublimating.
Reason
high quality, historical picture
Articles this image appears in
Phoenix (spacecraft)
Creator
user:DragonFire1024 NASA/JPL
  • Open the red, green and blue images as layers (in the Gimp, it's File -> Open as layer) so that the blue is on the bottom and red on top. Set each layer to 33% opacity and add a white background layer. Colorize each image layer (Filters -> Colors -> Colorify) with their respective colors. Then flatten the image and boost both the brightness and contrast. I'm not sure of the true color accuracy of this, but hey it works. MER-C 01:53, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Those images are no larger and are also jpegs so it's probably not going to help much. I would be very surprised if they were beamed to earth with any kind of lossy compression - it would make any kind of reasearch on the images difficult. They are far more likely sending RAW sensor data of some kind with lossless compression. It's odd that they don't make anything larger or any TIFF versions available though. Mfield (talk) 01:58, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Actually had an engineer that worked on the design of the phoenix lander come and give a lecture at uni, one thing I took away from that was how limited the supply of energy was on the lander, and that the radiation hardened computers they use are relatively slow by today's consumer PC standards. I'd imagine that compression is probably relatively costly in terms of energy and computation time so a non artifacted version might be availible. I wouldn't be expecting a higher resolution shot though unfortunately. Noodle snacks (talk) 08:34, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Not promoted MER-C 02:33, 27 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]