Stepped Pyramid on Mars Image by Mars Express

Originally posted by worldwatcher
why can't they just have Mars Express take some nice 3D pics of the Cydonia Plain????

I thought the Mars Express had been over the Cydonia region and had received new pictures...I recall the lighting being very different, that made it look more like nothing more than hills on the surface.

/me runs off to look for link

I take that back, seems it was NASA's Mars Global Explorer, not ESA's Mars Express. From the ESA site:

"Is there really a face on Mars?
There is a big formation on Mars that looks remarkably like a humanoid face. It appears in two different frames of Viking Orbiter imagery. The feature, about 2.5 kilometres across, is located near the border between region Arabia Terra and region Acidalia Planitia. Although most analyst agreed that the resemblance is most likely coincidental and caused by lighting effects, science writer Richard Hoagland has championed the idea that the �face� is artificial, intended to resemble a human, and erected by an extraterrestrial civilisation.
In April 1998 NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft ended all speculation by photographing the site of the allured 'face' in high resolution. The photos revealed it to be a natural landform."

Interesting Mars face link with pictures

Also on Venus and Mars. While Venus is in what we would call Hell, with oceans of boiling lead and all, while Mars could seem like it's been wiped out by some nuclear war of some kind. Just look at all the craters, what if they are the results of bombs and missiles, not incoming rocks from space... Just a thought....

Blessings,
Mikromarius

I stared at that image for a sec.

And then panned around to inspect the other portions.

The dark cave entrances appear to be a shadow play at dusk or dawn.

And the blocking looks like cross-interleave error correction, designed to replace dropped out bits of image.

Cross interleave error correction can mathmatically calculate the values of lost data, but may not be as high res as an original.

Now on the left, scroll down on the left, to where the horizon meets the edge of image.

The same blocking is present, and about the same sizes, yet from a much closer perspective.

The image I believe has been filled in with error-correction to replace lost bits in the transmission of the data.

IMHO



[Edited on 18-2-2004 by smirkley]

Interesting, my wife's an archaeologist who is used to looking at aerial/geophysical images of this sort.

Earlier today, I took this photo and saved it as a greyscale image (to remove the tell-tale red that would indicate that it is Martian) so that I could show it to her without telling her what it was and ask her opinion.

My question was: "What do you make of this image, is it a natural or manmade formation?"

Her immediate reply was that in her opinion it was unquestionably manmade. She added that it looked like a settlement, penned within a rectangle, with the pyramid-like structure as the most prominent feature within the 'town'.

The image, she continued, looks very like radar/geophys images she has seen of mayan settlements which aren't usually visible to the nakes eye because of rainforest cover.

She was somewhat surprised to learn that the pic was from Mars!

I think it's just some pixelating happening there...