"We had to roll the spacecraft 25 degrees to center the Face in the field of view," said Garvin. Nevertheless, on Ap- a cloudless summer day in Cydonia - Mars Global Surveyor drew close enough for a second look. "We just don't pass over the Face very often," he noted. "In fact, it's hard work." Mars Global Surveyor is a mapping spacecraft that normally looks straight down and scans the planet like a fax machine in narrow 2.5 km-wide strips. "It's not easy to target Cydonia," says Garvin. Mission controllers prepared to look again. Perhaps, said skeptics, alien markings were hidden by haze. The camera on board MGS had to peer through wispy clouds to see the Face. The Face on Mars is located at 41 degrees north martian latitude where it was winter in April '98 - a cloudy time of year on the Red Planet. View the 2001 photo in dazzling high-resolution!īut not everyone was satisfied. There was no alien monument after all.Ībove: Side by side: a Viking 1 photo from 1976, a Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) image from 1998, and the latest MGS image from 2001. Thousands of anxious web surfers were waiting when the image first appeared on a JPL web site, revealing. "We photographed the Face as soon as we could get a good shot at it."Īnd so on April 5, 1998, when Mars Global Surveyor flew over Cydonia for the first time, Michael Malin and his Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) team snapped a picture ten times sharper than the original Viking photos. "We felt this was important to taxpayers," explained Jim Garvin, chief scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program. 1997, eighteen long years after the Viking missions ended. Meanwhile, defenders of the NASA budget wish there was an ancient civilization on Mars.Īlthough few scientists believed the Face was an alien artifact, photographing Cydonia became a priority for NASA when Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) arrived at the Red Planet in Sept. It has starred in a Hollywood film, appeared in books, magazines, radio talk shows - even haunted grocery store checkout lines for 25 years! Some people think the Face is bona fide evidence of life on Mars - evidence that NASA would rather hide, say conspiracy theorists. ![]() The "Face on Mars" has since become a pop icon. Sign up for EXPRESS SCIENCE NEWS delivery formed by shadows giving the illusion of eyes, nose and mouth." The authors reasoned it would be a good way to engage the public and attract attention to Mars. The caption noted a "huge rock formation. Click here for a 2001 photo from Mars Global Surveyor that reveals the true appearance of the Face.Ī few days later NASA unveiled the image for all to see. Scientists figured it was just another Martian mesa, common enough around Cydonia, only this one had unusual shadows that made it look like an Egyptian Pharaoh.Ībove: A 1976 Viking 1 photograph of the Face on Mars. There must have been a degree of surprise among mission controllers back at the Jet Propulsion Lab when the face appeared on their monitors. An enormous head nearly two miles from end to end seemed to be staring back at the cameras from a region of the Red Planet called Cydonia. NASA's Viking 1 spacecraft was circling the planet, snapping photos of possible landing sites for its sister ship Viking 2, when it spotted the shadowy likeness of a human face. The side we did not see was all broken up.- Twenty five years ago something funny happened around Mars. Had we seen both sides of the face, we may not have thought it was a face. In the original Viking image, we did not see the part of the face that was all broken up-we just saw the best side of the face. The human brain has specialized mechanisms for face recognition, and can easily interpret what it sees as a face. ![]() Pareidolia is the tendency of a human observer to interpret a configuration of objects as a human face. However, this notion is not accepted by any Mars scientist, and higher resolution photos of the face taken by the HiRISE cameras of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have shown that it is just an ordinary land-form. One might guess that with better images, the face would look more like a face, but it just looks like a broken up mesa.ĭue to the fact that the first few pictures of the face showed a face like structure due to shadows, fringe theories have arisen that the face (and surrounding mesas) were built by an alien civilization, and that NASA was covering up the evidence. This article has been updated with many pictures that were taken with more advanced cameras then the original image that showed the face. The Face on Mars is an eroded mesa-like landform in the Cydonia region.
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