THE PEOPLE WHO PROCESS THE COSMOS
At a press conference moments after the landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars, NASA’s science chief Thomas Zurbuchen invited the audience to, “take a look at the RAW images, and play with them,” adding “What can you find on those pictures?”
Planetary scientist Emily Lakdawalla (see box, left) didn’t need an invitation. As soon as the first photos of the eerie landscape captured by Percy’s navigation cameras were published online, she was busy removing geometric distortions, adjusting colour levels and interpreting metadata on the image files.
Meanwhile, 3D visual artist Mattias Malmer (see box, page 68) was using the RAW images to reconstruct the landscape in Mars’s Jezero crater so his kids could visit the Red Planet wearing virtual reality goggles. Malmer is doing the same with data from NASA’s Curiosity rover (“I’m very much in love with that landscape,” he says), and with the scant images that the Russian Venera landers captured from the surface of Venus in the 1980s.
You might think that professional planetary scientists would hate ‘amateurs’ to dabble with their images, but instead, “they love it,” says Lakdawalla. “They don’t have the time and the
