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Weird news: NASA sends the Mona Lisa to the moon via laser

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 21:53:00 +0000

For the past four years, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling the moon on a fact-finding mission, creating gravitational maps and snapping pictures of space garbage!

But lately it's been serving an entirely new, unexpected purpose: as a celestial gallery wall for the Mona Lisa.

How they do it is a little tricky, so I'll leave it to the folks at Popular Science to translate:

NASA converted an image of the Mona Lisa into a black and white, 152-by-200 pixel image. After that, they signaled to the orbiter how bright to make each pixel by delaying the message (or "pulse) to one of 4,096 slots in a very small time-frame. In other words, instead of a continuous stream of pulses in regular intervals, the laser varied the time between intervals. Depending on the length of that variation, the pixel appeared one of 4,096 shades of gray. Rinse and repeat with each pixel until you have the Mona Lisa.

There were still some kinks in the transmission -- some of the pixels weren't the right shade of gray -- but scientists corrected for it through processes that are used in correcting problems with CDs and DVDs.

Researchers claim to have uncovered second Mona Lisa

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 14:36:00 +0000

After 35 years of research, the Swiss-based Mona Lisa Foundation has declared that it has "historical, comparative and scientific evidence" that Leonardo da Vinci painted another Mona Lisa, known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa. According to the Foundation, the painting predates the more famous Mona Lisa by 11 or 12 years.

Foundation member and art historian Stanley Feldman told the Associated Press, "So far, not one scientific test has been able to disprove that the painting is by Leonardo." The analysis included regression tests, mathematical comparisons and looking at historical and archival records. "We have used methods that were not available to Leonardo 500 years ago," he said.

Not everyone is convinced of the painting's origins, however. Art historians have known about the painting for about 100 years, but many experts have doubted its age or whether da Vinci painted it. One major critic, Martin Kemp, an Oxford University professor and Leonardo expert, wrote in an email to the AP that "the reliable primary evidence provides no basis for thinking that there was `an earlier' portrait of Lisa del Giocondo" (the French title of the painting).