There is a similar blemish on the lower left of the previous frame (frame d), except it is smaller (about half the size) and lighter than the background, rather than darker.
Could these be transmission errors, affecting several pixels? Both were lacking any detail.
The vast majority of photos coming from JPL with regard to Spirit and Opportunity do not have anything to indicate errors, transmission or otherwise. Normally transmission errors are large and obvious, looking a bit like streaks of snow on a TV. The Russian Venus probe pictures show this and had to be cleaned up. I am admittedly, however, not a professional in this field.
The pictures are of relatively poor quality being only several hundred kilobytes in size. With this low resolution little can be distinguished, despite enlargement.
Another possibility is a "speck of dust." A speck on the lens, however, should produce nothing but blur and would likely be in all pictures in exactly the same spot.
This is not the case. It appears in some -- a very few -- pictures and moves around from picture to picture. A speck on a protective glass cover might not be extremely out of focus, but again it would appear in all pictures in the same place and look identical each time.
This is not the case.I believe the probability is that we are seeing an
object in the sky of Mars. What kind of object is open to debate. It might be dust that flew past the camera and was frozen by the camera's shutter speed. What are the odds, however, that a
single grain of dust would do this. A breeze, in a place where there is precious little air, would have to kick it up and if that were the case there should be a fair amount of dust that would appear as speckles or a dust cloud,
not a single speck.
I don't believe the "speck of dust" theory is likely. It is, therefore, probably something else. But what? A gnat possibly, or a bird. More mundane might be a Martian Moon. But would they be visible from the surface during the day? It is darker on Mars than it is here, a fact concealed by the automatically adjusting camera. That a Moon would appear in one photo and be gone in the next when the pictures were taken together in a single sequence is unlikely.
Once again, it is an unknown flying object of some kind. Now we are back to gnats and birds. But there exists the possibility of a
designed vehicle of some sort. The watchers are watching the watchers. So, it is either a gnat, a bird, or I spy. But a
UFO in either case.
///tomcat///
