At 09:18:37 UTC the Mastcam Left photographed a field of sand dunes, with a track left by a rover wheel.
The aforementioned track is visible in the lower part of the photo and in some places it has removed the superficial sand layer thus exposing the layer below.
Thanks to this expedient, we can observe how the turquoise tint that characterizes these sand dunes is present only in a thin surface layer under which the coloration is decidedly more brownish.
Considering that the windblown dust is decidedly reddish, where does this layer between green and turquoise come from?
The original image is a black and white encoding of the Bayer mask that has been converted to color through a process called “debayering” or “demosaicing”. In addition, the photo has undergone noise reduction due to Jpeg compression, white balance and a slight increase in microcontrast and color saturation in order to make the colors more similar to what the human eye would see.
Original image: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/02732/mcam/2732ML0143220011004587C00_DXXX.jpg
This post has been automatically translated. See the original post here.