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Summary
DescriptionMars Viking 21i093.png
English: This false color photo of the surface of Mars was taken by Viking Lander 2 at its Utopia Planitia landing site on May 18, 1979, and relayed to Earth by Orbiter 1 on June 7. It shows a thin coating of water ice on the rocks and soil. The time the frost appeared corresponds almost exactly with the buildup of frost one Martian year (23 Earth months) ago. Then it remained on the surface for about 100 days. Scientists believe dust particles in the atmosphere pick up bits of solid water. That combination is not heavy enough to settle to the ground. But carbon dioxide, which makes up 95 percent of the Martian atmosphere, freezes and adheres to the particles and they become heavy enough to sink. Warmed by the Sun, the surface evaporates the carbon dioxide and returns it to the atmosphere, leaving behind the water and dust. The ice seen in this picture, like that which formed one Martian year ago, is extremely thin, perhaps no more than one-thousandth of an centimeter thick. The view is looking towards the south southeast, the long boulder to the right is roughly one meter across.
I used the original 21i093.blu, 21i093.grn and 21i093.red images from the NASA Viking image archive, converted them to .png, manually removed the noise and finally merged them into one image (almost matching true color; see here for the channel mixing process). Except for the conversion, this was all done in Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Adobe Photoshop CS4. The original files by NASA are in the public domain, and so is this new one.
This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Van der Hoorn at English Wikipedia. This applies worldwide. In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so: Van der Hoorn grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse
The image is based on an original image from NASA to which the following copyright statement is applicable:
The NASA website hosts a large number of images from the Soviet/Russian space agency, and other non-American space agencies. These are not necessarily in the public domain.
The SOHO (ESA & NASA) joint project implies that all materials created by its probe are copyrighted and require permission for commercial non-educational use. [2]
{{Information |Description={{en|1=Original Caption Released with NASA Image:<br /> This color image shows a thin layer of water ice frost on the martian surface at Utopia Planitia. It was taken by Viking 2 Lander camera 2 on 18 May 1979, almost exactly on