http://mikebara.blogspot.ro/2008/01/revisting-true-colors-of-mars.htmlDr. Gil Levin's first-hand recollections of the whole affair are recounted in a recent
book by science writer Barry DiGregorio. In the book, Levin relates the remarkable
overreaction by JPL that occurred in response to Ron Levin's naive efforts to "correct"
what seemed to him to be a deliberate distortion of the incoming Viking Lander data.
According to DiGregorio's narrative:
"At about 2:00 p.m. PDT, the first color image from the surface of another Planet,
Mars, began to emerge on the JPL color video monitors located in many of the
surrounding buildings, specifically set up for JPL employees and media Personnel to view
the Viking images. Gil and Ron Levin sat in the main control room where dozens of video monitors and anxious technicians waited to see this historic first color picture. As the image developed on the monitors, the crowd of scientists, technicians and media reacted enthusiastically to a scene that would be absolutely unforgettable — Mars in color. The image showed an Arizona-like landscape: blue sky, brownish-red desert soil and gray rocks with green splotches.
"Gil Levin commented to Patricia Straat (his co-investigator) and his son Ron, 'Look at that image! It looks like Arizona'" (see photo above).
"Two hours after the first color image appeared on the monitors,
a technician abruptly changed the image from the light-blue sky and Arizona-like landscape to a uniform orange-red sky and landscape. Ron Levin looked in disbelief as the technician went from monitor to monitor making the change. Minutes later, Ron followed him, resetting the colors to their original appearance. Levin and Straat were interrupted when they heard someone being chastised. It was Ron Levin being chewed out by the Viking project director himself, James S. Martin, Jr. Gil Levin immediately inquired as to what was going on. Martin had caught Ron changing all the color monitors back to their original settings. He warned Ron that if he tried something like that again, he'd be thrown out of JPL for good. The director then asked a TRW engineer assisting the Biology team, Ron Gilje, to follow Ron Levin around to every color monitor and change it back to the red landscape. "What Gil Levin, Ron and Patricia Straat did not know (even to this writing) is that
the order to change the colors came directly from the NASA administrator himself. Dr. James Fletcher. Months later, Gil Levin sought out the JPL Viking imaging team technician who actually made the changes and asked why it was done. The technician responded that he had instructions from the Viking imaging team that the Mars sky and landscape should be red and went around to all the monitors, "tweaking" them to make it so. Gil Levin said, "The new settings showed the American flag (painted on the Landers) as having purple stripes. The technician said that the Mars atmosphere made the flag appear that way [emphasis added]."
It turns out that DiGregorio's statement that the NASA administrator was behind the
monitor changing incident was based on a confirmation of this from an official source —
former JPL public affairs officer Jurrie J. Van der Woude — and it had an even stranger
and somewhat sinister angle: In a letter to DiGregorio (also reproduced in Mars: The
Living Planet), Van der Woude wrote:
"Both Ron Wichelman [of JPL's Image Processing laboratory (IPL)] and I were responsible for the color quality control of the Viking Lander photographs, and Dr. Thomas Mutch, the Viking Imaging Team leader, told us that he got a call from the NASA Administrator asking that we destroy the Mars blue sky negative created from the original digital data."
This bizarre sequence of events raises many disturbing questions. For instance, why
was the administrator of NASA so determined to conceal the "true" colors of Mars from
the American people and the world in 1976? Why would he order the head of the Viking
Imaging Team to literally eliminate an important piece of historical evidence from the
official mission archive — the original "blue-sky negative" — if the initial release was only
an honest technical mistake? Wouldn't that record be an important part of the ultimate,
triumphant story of NASA scientists correcting initial scientific errors, in their continued
exploration of the frontier and alien environment of another world? And why would a
young teenager (the son of one of the key investigators on the Viking mission, no less) be threatened with expulsion by the director of the project for simply tweaking a couple of color monitors around the lab?