In the above image from strip M03-05186, get your eyes down close to the screen for detailed examination and you should see that each tiny object in the large dark area is rectangular in shape and each is uniform in size and height with its neighbors and just one of thousands of such objects in long closely packed rows constituting the great mass of these structures you see here. Even more importantly, the precision of their placement is so exact that each object fits precisely in rows at right angle to each other like headstones in a military cemetery. It should be obvious to anyone, especially in light of variations in the terrain under these structures that should have but didn't force more compromises in their precise placements, that this kind of exacting and rigid precision is most definitely not characteristic of any natural geology or causation but is very characteristic of forethought, planning, artificiality, and the manipulations of intelligent life.
Probe images 'smiley face' crater
Surface with a smile: Crater Galle
Enlarge Image
Images taken by Europe's Mars Express spacecraft show a crater on the Red Planet that looks like a "happy face".
Crater Galle contains parallel gullies on its southern rim, a possible sign of liquid water running on Mars' surface.
Its interior has also been shaped by the action of wind and shows signs of "dust devil" tracks, which have removed the bright surface coating of dust.
A US space agency (Nasa) orbiter has also sent back its first colour image after arriving at Mars on 11 March.
The "face" in the European images was first pointed out in photos taken during Nasa's Viking Orbiter 1 mission.
The 230km- (143 mile-) wide impact crater contains a large stack of layered sediments which forms an outcrop in the southern part of the crater.
Lowered orbit
The US space agency's (Nasa) Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) had already returned black and white images from its high-resolution cameras.
Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken its first colour image of the Red Planet
Mission scientists have now released a colour image of the eastern eastern Bosporos Planum region.
This is not natural colour as seen by our eyes, but infrared colour, which is shifted to longer wavelengths. The image has also been processed to enhance subtle colour variations.
The southern half of the scene is brighter and bluer than the northern half, perhaps due to early-morning fog in the atmosphere.
MRO's cameras will take the most detailed images ever of the Red Planet. Once the orbiter has descended to its lower mapping orbit, the cameras will be able to pick out objects just under 1m (3ft) across.
yetifeet1975 said:Cool site, though I got a bit nervous when I saw someone waving back at me.
BlackRiverFalls said:....
Wonder if a google titan is in the pipeline...
Cydonia? But I hardly know ya!mejane1 said:admit it... how many of you searched for the infamous face?
Jane.
New images of the "face" on Mars have been obtained by Europe's Mars Express spacecraft. They reinforce what scientists thought from the beginning – that the face is just a naturally sculpted hill.
The "face" appeared in a photo of Mars's Cydonia region taken in 1976 by NASA's Viking 1 spacecraft. NASA scientists believed from the beginning that the feature was simply a hill that happened to look like a face because of the way the Sun cast shadows across it at the time the photo was taken.
However, the image sparked speculation that the face was built by aliens and that NASA was trying to cover it up.
The agency used the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft to take new images of the region in 1998 and 2001. The new, much more detailed images showed a hill with no particular resemblance to a face (see Martian conspiracy theorists lose face).
Email campaign
But since the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft arrived at Mars in 2003, many unconvinced members of the general public have been asking mission scientists to take more images of the feature.
"So many people wrote me emails – hundreds – saying, 'Why don't you image Cydonia, tell us the truth, we don't believe NASA,'" says Gerhard Neukum of the Free University of Berlin, Germany, chief scientist for Mars Express's High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC).
Mission controllers have been trying to get images of the region since 2004 but had been thwarted until recently by dust and haze in the atmosphere. Finally, on 22 July 2006, the team obtained clear images of the region with the HRSC.
By making observations of the area from slightly different angles as the spacecraft moved through its orbit, mission scientists have been able to build a 3D map of the "face" and the surrounding area.
Sculpted by erosion
The hill that sparked so much speculation is clearly seen in the new images to be a natural feature shaped by erosion, says Agustin Chicarro, ESA's chief scientist for Mars Express.
"My grandfather used to collect pieces of wood that look like birds or dogs or things like that," he told New Scientist. "This is the same thing – people get excited and see what they want to see. What has modelled these reliefs is simply erosion."
Neukum agrees. "It’s a mountainous structure and there's no artificial thing. These are mounds that have survived a general erosional process," he told New Scientist.
The whole area was once as high as the tops of the hills in the region, he says, but most of it has eroded down, with a few more resistant areas surviving as hills. The erosion is probably the result of ancient glaciers or perhaps liquid water carving into the rock, he says.
http://www.newscientistspace.com/articl ... -hill.html
But what's a "genuine anomaly"? If it's an anomaly, what makes it genuine? I'm quite happy to believe that there are rocks on Mars which look a bit like something othere than merely a rock when viewed from a certain angle, but I haven't yet seen anything that is categorically not a trick of the light or a puzzling shadow.OldTimeRadio said:I do believe there are genuine anomalies on Mars.
Actually, if you go to that site I linked above, there ARE claimed photographs of giant domes and other strucures on the moon. I'm not saying for one minute that I see what others apparently do when I look at these photos, but they're up there, nonetheless. The site also contains a number of interesting images of the Martian anomalies.OldTimeRadio said:I'm aware that some observers have claimed to see structures and giant machines on the Moon. But the presented "evidence" for those is entirely drawings and sketches, NOT photographs.
Well, if we didn't recognise something, how could we know that we were seeing something?Jerry_B said:The problem with all this sort of 'evidence' is that it doesn't seem any different from the 'evidence' that used to insist that there were canals on Mars. Or that there was a 'face' on Mars.
The other problem is that, if all of this 'evidence' does indeed point to structures being on Mars, isn't it a little odd that such things are pretty much recognisable to us? Not very alien is it? For all we know, there could be alien objects on Mars, but we have no way of recognising them as such. But, as usual, it seems that such 'alien' stuff is always something that we can pretty much readily recognise
*cough!* Simulacra *cough!*
Not necessarily, unless your suggesting some sort of Cthullan 'non-Euclidian' geometry for the Martian 'structures'?Jerry_B said:That assumes somewhat that Martians build things in the same way we do, at least in ways that we would recognise. I think that this sort 'evidence' is nothing more than simulacra (and at many times removed from the object itself). First we had 'canals', now we have 'structures', etc..
There are two apparently tube like features which some people think are anomalies; one is a peculiar type of dry river which looks like a tube but is actually a channel with a hemispherical cross-section;Pietro_Mercurios said:I haven't seen anything more about those weird, tube like structures, allegedly threading through the Martian surface, that someone had photos of on their site. Have they just vanished away?
Try here for a start;Where are all the high def. photos from the European Space Agency satellite, Mars Express? What are they hiding from us?
Jerry_B said:The problem with all this sort of 'evidence' is that it doesn't seem any different from the 'evidence' that used to insist that there were canals on Mars. Or that there was a 'face' on Mars.