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New photos of Mars ‘without the filter’ have gone viral on social media this week and people are really confused about the true color of the planet.
When you think of Mars, you imagine it to be bright orange or red, right? Well, so does everyone else – but new images shared this month say otherwise…
‘Real’ photos of Mars go viral
The photos were shared by a Twitter account called Latest In Space which has over a million followers and reports on space events in real-time.
On August 8, the account tweeted a series of photos of the fourth planet in our solar system which were taken with the Mars helicopter.
The small flying device, named Ingenuity or Ginny, is part of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission and regularly operates on Mars.
Along with the Perseverance rover, it flies over the surface of the planet and takes pictures which are sent back to Earth.
Here are the latest ones:
And some more:
Mars ‘without the red filter’
The space images are sparking confusion as the planet looks really normal, with an almost blue sky, brown dusty surface and large rocks.
It looks like it could have been taken in the desert somewhere on Earth and Mars doesn’t have that red tint it usually does.
Photos of the planet always used to look really ominous, with a dark red ground and murky orange sky – and everyone is really confused.
One person wrote on Twitter: “Always thought it was strange how older pictures of Mars (for some reason) always had an orange hue almost like it was a filter put over the pictures. Now we see pictures like this where it looks like earth… so which is it?”
“Mars’ sky used to be orange, why the filter in the past? They acted like it was under a constant dust storm for two decades,” said another.
NASA photoshop conspiracy
The new pictures have sparked theories that NASA used to photoshop the images of Mars and apply a red filter to them.
“NASA used to apply a red filter to all images from Mars, but then abruptly stopped a few years back,” one person tweeted.
Another said: “I do find it interesting that NASA adds an orange filter to the Mars photos to make them appear redder (or some other nefarious reason I suppose).”
Such conspiracies have actually been around for decades, ever since NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft first landed on Mars in 1971.
In the first-ever photos of the so-called ‘red planet’, the sky looked blue and the landscape appeared relatively similar to Earth.
However, team member Carl Sagan later announced at a press conference: “Despite the impression on these images, the sky is not blue… The sky is in fact pink.”
Ever since then, people have speculated that NASA manipulates the color of Mars to appear red and orange, but in reality, it’s probably the other way around.
NASA likely color balances the raw images of Mars to show what the red planet would look like under more Earth-like conditions.
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