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Xavier Jenks (Domatron Graves)
A picture from NASA's Curiosity rover was retouched for a spoof website to look as if Mardi Gras beads were lying on the Martian surface. The whitish-gray object visible in the center of the picture is an actual scrap of plastic that came from Curiosity and was spotted on the ground.
For a while, it almost looked as if NASA was really spilling the beans — or rather, the beads — about the Curiosity rover's hush-hush discoveries on Mars. And that was precisely the problem.
A spoof website, NASAUpdateCenter.us, made a splash on Thursday by proclaiming that Curiosity discovered "small spheres" that turned out to be made of plastic. The purported press release drew heavily on the logos and page design used by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and was accompanied by a picture showing strings of the tiny spheres — which looked suspiciously like Mardi Gras necklaces.
Curiosity's science team is scheduled to provide an eagerly awaited update on the rover mission at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco on Monday. Some of the initial news reports suggested the scientists were getting ready to announce a discovery that would be "one for the history books." (On Thursday, NASA said such "rumors and speculation" were incorrect.)
"I basically thought that with all the hype NASA made last week about an earthshaking release, we could build off that hype and set off the story before them," Domatron Graves, a.k.a. Xavier Jenks, explained in an email. Graves, who told me he's a 25-year-old Mardi Gras production artist and "publicity stuntman" from New Orleans, was the prime mover behind the "plastic beads" prank.
The website was meant as a joke, and as a sly marketing campaign for Graves' Mardi Gras team, the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus. Hence the plastic beads. One of the pages on the site even featured a "Face on Mars" picture that morphed into the furry visage of Chewbacca from the Star Wars saga.
The way Graves tells the story, NASA wasn't amused. He said he received a phone call from someone claiming to be from JPL, informing him that his use of the space agency's logos was a federal offense. Graves and his Web team had the bogus "press release" taken down by 1 p.m. ET today.
"I'm trying not to go to jail," he told me over the phone.
I haven't yet been able to track down exactly who spoke with him. Bert Ulrich, who serves as a multimedia liaison at NASA Headquarters in Washington, told me he wasn't aware that anyone from the agency contacted Graves. "It's news to us," he wrote in an email.
There is a law on the books that forbids the unauthorized use of NASA's official logos and program identifiers (14 CFR 1221), backed up by the threat of a six-month jail term (18 USC 701). But it's unlikely that NASA would actually pursue prosecution — and even if the agency did prosecute, you could argue that Graves and his pals would be protected by policies governing fair use and parody. In any case, that argument is now moot.
One of the issues might have been that the look and feel of the fake press release was so serious, even though the claim was clearly ridiculous. Real names were used in the wrong contexts, and the claims were couched in terms typically used to describe Mars' truly weird blueberries. It'd take a sharp observer (like Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait) to see right away that the whole thing was baloney.
The full text of the bogus press release has been taken down, but you can get a sense of the tone from this screenshot:
Xavier Jenks (Domatron Graves)
This is not a NASA news release, but because of the way it was presented on a spoof website, some people thought it actually came from NASA.
NASA is one of the more trusted agencies in the federal government, although surveys suggest that trust has fallen in recent years. The hubbub over Martian discoveries is particularly sensitive, in light of the misunderstandings surrounding what Curiosity has or has not found so far. So it's understandable that the space agency might not appreciate a spoof that gave the wrong impression — as opposed to a spoof like the "We're NASA and We Know It" viral video, which celebrates the Curiosity mission's true accomplishments.
If Graves had been able to hold out a little bit longer, he would have added some references to the Mardi Gras krewe's home page — to signal that the website was a spoof and generate a little online traffic for Chewbacchus. That's what he did in the case of the New Orleans Bigfoot Society, another prank website that he and his friends cooked up last year. But after the hurried removal of the faux NASA Web pages, the spoof website has been reduced to a text-only page with a Web link paying tribute to "the Sacred Drunken Wookiee!"
Let's just hope Lucasfilm doesn't go after Graves for copyright infringement. NASA's displeasure is nothing, compared to the wrath of the "Star Wars" empire.
Update for 10:30 p.m. ET: Veronica McGregor, who manages the news and social media office at JPL, sent me an email that filled in most of the remaining gaps in the story. "What I know about the site is, the manager/owner was contacted," she wrote. "The content on the site was not a concern, in fact we've truly enjoyed all of the spoofs out there. As you mentioned, it was the use of the page design, name and logos — and the possibility of confusion — that was the concern. ... We didn't think people would be confused over the beads, just the page design."
Update for 8:25 p.m. ET Dec. 3: The NASAUpdateCenter.us website is back with lots of graphics, but none of the NASA elements that got Graves in trouble.
More whimsy about the Curiosity rover on Mars:
- LaughPong via YouTube: Cool things to find
- Sat. Morning Breakfast Cereal: How NASA announcements work
- Weird plastic object traced to Mars rover
- More real news about Curiosity's mission
Graves acknowledges that the "Domatron" in his name is a nom d'art, but he insists that the last name is real. "I'm a Graves," he told me. I found his contact information by tracing the domain-registration listing for NASAUpdateCenter.us, and reached him by phone just as he was arranging for the faux press release to be taken down.
Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
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Well, what a bunch of poopy-heads. (To borrow a phrase from Grover Norquist). Geez NASA get your act together. First you hint at a "history making" discovery on Mars. Everyone leaps to the logical conclusion and all of a sudden you're all "no, no that's not it." and when somebody tries to poke a little fun at your faux pas you get all medieval on them.
booooooooo, that's for you NASA.
Now will you please release the information you are trying to cover up, that you've at last found evidence of giant Martian sand worms? And apparently they are wearing Mardi Gras beads. How festive!
There WILL be worms.
Warms like this? LOL -Seriously though, I really want to find out what these are http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/m07_m12/images/M11/M1104220.html
Worms* I'm not immune from spelling errors even if they give me time to edit apparently!
We are prepared to offer FREE memberships in the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus to the entire Mars Rover Team! chewbacchus.org
worms are one thing, but I would be really curious to see what "warms" looked like. ;)
Some people will believe anything....
It should be obvious that photo is doctored, especially in the areas where beads appear to be translucent over the pebbles.
If you look closely you can see a woman flashing her breasts in a reflection on one of the beads.
I can see her!
I can too! She has three breasts!
Reflection of Curiosity's close-up camera in another bead.
leaping lizards, now, i am afraid to write anything about NASA. I might get a late night phone call, from a guy with a gruff voice.
How long before this ends up on the whacky conspiracy theory website ATS? ROFL!
In the case
CAMPBELL, aka SKYYWALKER, et al. v.
ACUFF ROSE MUSIC, INC., the Supreme Court of the United States ruled "the fair use of a copyrighted work . . . for purposes such as criticism [or] comment . . . is not an infringement . . . ," and thereby ruled that satire is a protected form of free speech.
And initially, I believe SCOTUS trumps NASA.
"which looked suspiciously like Mardi Gras necklaces"
The funniest part is somebody spoofed the spoofer and now HE is spooked.
Can't imagine the Martian dino's invented plastic before invading earth 350 mil yr. ago. Maybe this years favorite colour beads at mardis gras will be martian red.
Both robots have been quite busy during this time of hush hush paper writing, you could be covering that awhile. I can't wait till we get this geology confernce over and get back to the day to day mundane comments from us here in the peanut gallery, cmon now, let's get on with it, we got some real science to do.....
see if ya can't get us that data from the sam, several of us down here in the peanut gallery have operated spectrascopic instruments and are quite capable of looking up the data sets for the corresponding elements and molecoules...and there are plenty more that don't need datasets to jump to conclusions anyways....I would really like a glimpse at the spectra of the first sample. I am not looking for plastic, I am looking for palladium and also te. Also, see if they will hand you a graph of the local temp and psi since arrival to present...there is a bit o new there.
I dropped acid in 93 during Mardi Gras. Standing on Burbon St. I turned and found myself standing alone on the surface of mars, in a flash I was again standing in the crowd. Maybe I actually was on Mars?
now can we use this principle to create an atmosphere on planets -we already have all the organisms and planets - we use the same species and process we don't have to wait for it to evolve we can do it straight away
creating a atmosphere using Principles of gravity electromagnetic and light you can use mirrors to deflect the suns rays to hit mars at certain times to increase evolution of the atmosphere
are we plants mirror image - we inhale oxygen and release co2 not absorb
could the human body actually need the revese lighting for photosynthesis of the body
Photosynthetic organisms are called photoautotrophs, since they can create their own food. In plants, algae, andcyanobacteria, photosynthesis uses carbon dioxide and water, releasing oxygen as a waste product.Many photosynthetic organisms have adaptations that concentrate or store carbon dioxide. This helps reduce a wasteful process called photorespiration that can consume part of the sugar produced during photosynthesis.
Schematic of photosynthesis in plants
The first photosynthetic organisms probably evolved about 3,500 million years ago, early in the evolutionary history of life, when all forms of life on Earth weremicroorganisms and the atmosphere had much more carbon dioxide. They most likely used hydrogen or hydrogen sulfide as sources of electrons, rather than water.[8]Cyanobacteria appeared later, around 3,000 million years ago, and drastically changed the Earth when they began to oxygenate the atmosphere, beginning about2,400 million years ago.[9] This new atmosphere allowed the evolution of complex life such as protists. Eventually, no later than a billion years ago, one of these protists formed a symbiotic relationship with a cyanobacterium, producing the ancestor of many plants and algae.[10] The chloroplasts in modern plants are the descendants of these ancient symbiotic cyanobacteria.[11]
mars could be our new home - twin planets that would be really cool
now if you pulled a ship to the bottom of the ocean and decreased it's density as it travels up the pressure will push it at high speed and when it exits the release of pressure will shoot it out like blow hole and as the atmosphere gets less dense you travel faster
you could go as far as creating electromagnetic cones and shoot through the center if all the magnetic s are equal in the funnels center magnetic and gravity would be nullified -
you shoot through a less dense atmosphere while using the principle of a black hole where neg goes pos is repelled out >that has to be repelled with great energy to be shot out from that tornado
now for a black hole to attract that much negativity but what if that is created by the density and magnetic pull actually pushing negative particles to g ether and producing a high positive energy which then continues to attract back in negative energy-could it be self sustaining and in principle almost be as close to perpetual motion
just a couple of thoughts
why can't you use a gel to recreate atmospheres and we an see how each gas and metal react to different densities and we can send electrical currents at different strengths to see how they react to changing electromagnetic fields - you can use the elements found in the universe
we can also study how the gel is separated by each one and the angles of reflection everything that is reflected like sound and light would move off objects in the same manner but at different densities sound and light have different densities so sound would need more power as it is dense and would not travel as far -sound would arrive from a distance at a later time than the light then if there was a solid then that would arrive later but what if you could sling shoot you way around a large magnet or a black hole or a planets atmospheric fields using the curvature of space and time densties to minimize drag
now what happens at the based of a tornado like a black hole the neg go in get compressed together by force and magnetic s the creates a positive energy
now the laws of symmetry may say that from that a equal black hole would exist pulling in the opposite with positive being dragged in and neg shot out maybe it is the tornado and curvature and magnetic s that use centrifugal force to propel the pos and neg together and cause an energy
this occurs in dark light and actually maybe to do with the direction the black holes spin now obviously this reaction occurs in nature so it can be used to our benefit by replicating on a much smaller scale
now i mentioned earlier about light energy
applying the principle above the 2 cones of electromagnetic would have to spin in opposite directions
The public's trust in NASA and their credibility has been slipping for several years just because of their response to pranks such as this. If NASA really wanted to rebuild their reputation, they shouldn't partially announce findings prematurely, but simply wait until there really is something to report. After all, the number of people who may ever travel to Mars in the future is miniscule compared to the number of people who have no jobs, have lost their homes and have no prospect of government assistance. NASA shoots billions of dollars into space yearly while Americans starve or live on welfare. It must be nice to have a NASA job where you can play with taxpayer money and still go home to your nice house and have a hot meal.
Obviously lifted from the John Carter Krewe.
Martian Gras!
It's an out of this world party!
nasaupdatecenter.us is back up and running (albeit slightly modified). Enjoy :)
I was wondering where I had left those beads.
Too Many Beers that night?
Roc: On advice of competent counsel, I respecfully invoke my right to the 5th amendment, as provided to me by the Constitution of the United States. Next question please.
This article is So Nola! #sonola76
NASA is trying to take the edge off the real discovery which has them totally snowed, with 'preventative spam'--sandwiching the truth between pairs of 'thieves dying the death':--Piles and piles of pictures show dust-and-rot-camouflaged fishes, lizards, mammals, humans, dinosaurs (allosaurus category), disputable only because these look so unfamiliar outside the museums of natural history... I've collected a 'dozen' A++ images from the image mele: There's no turning back--Curiosity is knee-deep in human prehistory on Mars... youtu.be/DuMQtWljUJ0 ...
Now you've done it. You said "spam sandwich". Now I'm hungry.
Fried Spam on Toast. Mmmmmm.
Very funny but oh so obvious. The second I say the photo I realized this is the kind of stuff they toss out during mardi gras. on the other hand could it be that et's on their way home from the crescent city had accidentally dropped the beads when they got out to stretch their legs (all eight of them). You know it is a long way back to beta reticuli or where ever. Is nasa covering something up. Was a ufo loaded with drunk half naked ets cavorting across the Martian surface. We'll find out soon. Watch the Krewe of Mars parade. The government will be also.