This is probably the most bizarre picture from Mars I’ve ever seen. Identified as one of seven openings to subsurface caves on the flank of the volcano Arsia Mons, the utter blackness of the hole suggests steep walls and an overhang at the surface. It just looks very peculiar. I’d love to get a view inside with the Sun more overhead, but even in this image it was 38 degrees above the horizon. That’s not that low. Notice how even on the shadowed rim (lower left) there is visible surface detail. That means that on the right the surface is either totally unreflective or is hidden far back to the right underneath a large overhang. Weird.
Mike Mellon (LASP, University of Colorado), a HiRISE team member offered this explanation for the peculiar appearance of this image:
It looks black because of the DN cut off in the lookup table. HiRISE is a 14 bit camera, but we usually LUT the data to 8 bits based on what we predict the histogram to look like. An unpredicted dark spot would get cut off.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
It looks like a hole in Antarctica. Is this snow - pwermafrost-what? Could the \
which part of Mars….?
This is on Arsia Mons, one of the four large volcanoes on the Tharsis bulge. Olympus Mons is the largest. Speaking of Olympus, I’m in Athens this week, so posts on the blog may be sporadic.
We’ll get a much better idea of what this hole is like when images are taken with different viewing angles and without the data compression mentioned above that give it that solid black appearance.
You have to understand this this is not just a black-n-white picture that you would obtain from a camera with film in it. It is the OUTPUT from an image sensing devise which has a program that speeds up the image processing based upon the previous image that was processed. So it\’s actually trying to guess what it\’s going to see next. Now under some very special circumstance this program produces a mistake (EXAMPLE all of those invisible objects video\’s on utube are just formed by video cameras misinterpretation. It wouldn\’t work with a cine-camera)
It\’s all to do with mathematics.
My point is that this is probably a mistake due to the program.
This however raises the posibility that a cloacking device is causing this anomaly.
Adrian, I think (except for the cloaking device part) that you are saying the same thing that Mike Mellon explained: the output is a result of a compression algorithm that zeroed out all low-count level pixels resulting in a sudden apparent transition to pure dark. The orbiter has obtained other images of this hole with better illumination. Stay tuned for when those are released.
im very interested in space and astronamy. but we should at this point in time focus all and every resourse we have on fixing our planet. after all we have already been to mars, we come from there.fix your planet and recognize how to live better, then explore all you want
Exploring Mars has taught us a lot (including that we most certainly did not come from there). The study of other planets is actually teaching us a lot about how to better take care of our own planet, and for far less money than we are spending on things that are actively destroying the planet.