Proof the Enterprise Image was Hoaxed

This TEM / Laney image used in this test was saved as a zero compression greyscale jpeg from a copy of the original tiff Keith Laney downloaded before applying a Gaussian blur. Hoagland has since used the Laney-blurred image as proof of buried ruins of an ancient civliization spanning the entire IR strip. Neither Hoagland or Laney has publicly released the original tiff image that he claims he downloaded on July 25th from the ASU site. For more data, download this copy of the original image downloaded by Keith Laney.

The TEM image has been rotated slightly counterclockwise, as one can see by examining the top of the image and comparing the alignment of the two images. The TEM image is also defocused, which is easily detected by examining the edges of the two images. These observations are consistant with the possibility that the TEM image was scanned from a print or transparency at some point in its creation.

The images below have additional contrast and brightness enhancement (stretch) to bring out the details more clearly. The blocky artifacts in the TEM image can be seen to line up clearly with the x and y axis of the pixels, strongly suggesting that they are image processing artifacts, and not structures on or beneath the surface of Mars. The TEM image has very little detail, greyscale levels are very flat over large areas compared to the NASA image, which exhibits a level of detail that one would expect in a daytime IR image of Mars.

The images below were made from the two 6.62 um filtered images mapped to RGB (R: 1  G: 1+2  B: 2) with a decorrelation stretch applied to bring out the difference in hue. Notice how the TEM image on the left exhibits blocky artifacts and color shift from left to right, while the NASA image does not exhibit these anomalies. The blocky artifacts show red and blue colorations that illustrate that these artifacts change significantly between the two 6.62 um images in the TEM version. The NASA image on the right shows only noise and subtle color changes as would be expected from nearly identical images that should differ only because of noise effects. This shows definitively that the TEM image has been hoaxed, and proves that the blocky artifacts are clearly part of the image processing applied in creating the hoax, and not buried structures on Mars as claimed by Richard Hoagland. I sincerely hope that this presentation will put to rest this hoax once and for all, so we can return to finding the real anomalies on Mars!

For comparison, the image below on the left is the raw IR image similarly processed from raw IR image I000817002edr.qub. Note the lack of change in hue horizontally across the image and lack of blocky artifacts, similar to the original NASA IR Cydonia image. This raw data has not been rotated to line up with true North. A contrast-enhanced greyscale version of the two bands averaged together is included on the right for comparison.

Finally, this 5x enlargement by pixel replication compares very closely to the original NASA image, showing significant surface detail and a similar pixel texture.