What made these tracks on Mars?

reply to post by IPILYA


GREAT FIND OP!!!

Yeah, pretty sure the NASA photoshop boys will be along in no time.

S&F!!!

Curious. The tracks do indeed end at the edge of the image suggesting an image artifact. However they also have identical shadows and highlights as the craters, note the direction of the sun and shadows. In addition the image without the tracks is clearly taken with different lighting conditions and so the "missing" tracks could be as a result of that.

If they are tracks then each one is about a kilometre wide! if they are 5km apart.

This requires further images of the same location in order to determine whether it is an artifact or a "track".

reply to post by miniatus


The images for google Mars are sourced from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor , so the originals should be available , if the "tracks are on the original then they may be real , if not then they are just and artifact created by google Mars ....probably

reply to post by whyamIhere

Things can not be what they appear. If we could go there say a few thousand and our robots and equipment
we might find Mars is strange indeed: breaking some of the beliefs and myths and yet producing even
more mysterious data. We'd be the invaders, the intelligent life in the universe and the martians all at the
same time. Assuming we know little or nothing, we are no position to proclaim that we are in and of any
place and time..only explorers that the science fiction writers glorified and the prey of merciless aliens thrill seekers of movies and television warned up about. That is what would make it so special..to the human
species that is. Don't lose that, your humaness or you lose everything.

Originally posted by malcr
Curious. The tracks do indeed end at the edge of the image suggesting an image artifact. However they also have identical shadows and highlights as the craters, note the direction of the sun and shadows. In addition the image without the tracks is clearly taken with different lighting conditions and so the "missing" tracks could be as a result of that.

If they are tracks then each one is about a kilometre wide! if they are 5km apart.

This requires further images of the same location in order to determine whether it is an artifact or a "track".

It only suggests that the two stitched images were taken at different times which is normal since satellites take snaps during an orbital pass.. it could take a long time for the satellite to be in the right position to take a neighboring photo to stitch.. my theory is still that it's rover tracks and simply that the one lacking the tracks was taken most likely before the tracks were laid.

reply to post by miniatus


The first image in the OP would seem to rule out the rover theory , if you look closely one track runs along side the crater and the other cuts down into it , then back up the side of the lip .
On closer inspection it looks like a quirk or artifact of google Mars to me .

There be Jawas on mars!

The lines are probably photo artifacts. These satellite images are not truly top-down views, they are skewed a bit due to perspective (you can also see this in Google Earth, if you look closely at buildings you never see just the roof, you see a bit of the walls too due to perspective). What this means is that when the lines cross craters, if they were tracks left be a vehicle they should follow the contour of the crater. IE, they should dip down and then back up again. Also if they were made by a vehicle, they should either detour around the crater (do you drive through potholes or around them?) or if the vehicle is so big that it could drive across craters then there should be no track marks inside the crater. Plus one has to wonder, if there's a vehicle this big cruising around Mars then where are all its other tracks? It all points to a photo anomoly.

reply to post by Glass


Haha awesome!!

these tracks seem pretty weird...waiting for someone to get to the bottom of it!
S&F!

Martians live in large subterranean cities. Come on people. How are we supposed to get to the bottom of this if we all can't get past every lie the Nazi fascist space program (Nasa) tells us?

Mars used to be Earth-like. Then the Martians played around with atomic bombs, and were forced to travel to Earth to recolonize. Hence why Mars is the God of War, and why certain craters were seemingly not caused by meteors, but rather glassed over like an atom bomb's effects would be.

Remember the Flintstones people, they were trying to tell you something.

I spun Mars slowly looking for more and found these. This photo shows the lines stop prior to the edge of the photo.



There seems to be several places on Mars(photos) that have these lines and they seem to be similar angles to each other. this set does not look like tracks but lines. They may be artifacts on Google but wouldn't they be on a lot of photos rather than just a few? or are they ones that have not been "cleaned up"?

Originally posted by Glass
There be Jawas on mars!

Well, we know they're not Sand People. Those tracks are side-by-side. Sand People travel in single file to hide their numbers.

Originally posted by miniatus
I could be wrong but I don't think it looks anything like an image artifact.. it ends where the images are combined but all that means is that the images were taken at different times .. one before the tracks were laid, one after..

It could very well be one of the mars rovers... that would be a very plausible explanation, if the over went one way and then returned along a parallel path it would cause this...

The width of the "track looking thing" is 5 kilometers (about 3 miles wide) outside-to-outside of "track". The length of them is 120 km.

Ignoring the incredibly wide tracks for a moment, the length of the alleged "tracks" is 120 km. That would be too long for the rovers. The rovers have only gone 7.7 km (Spirit) and 30 km (Opportunity) in their lifetimes.

It these are real tracks left by a real thing, that thing was very, very big.

As I said in my earlier post, it could easily be an image artifact. There are other lines like that in other images of Mars, many seeming end where images are stitched together. Since we know image artifacts like this can exist, I would believe that are image artifacts before I believe there is a 3 mile wide machine roving all over Mars.

That would be an artifact from the images they are using. You can tell it's not actually a feature on the surface, because it abruptly ends where the images are stitched together:



You can see more of the same kind of artifacting a little to west:

reply to post by nataylor


So what causes this to happen in some places but not in most? Different camera(ie. different satellite)?

Barring an image artifact, I'm more inclined to believe they're trails left by sandstorms, or some other wind phenomenon. If you follow some of those lines over large enough distances and at high enough resolution, they don't always follow a straight line, suggesting they may very well be natural. Even if they were completely straight, you'd be surprised what kind of eerily accurate geometric patterns nature can create.

Originally posted by IPILYA
reply to post by nataylor

 

So what causes this to happen in some places but not in most? Different camera(ie. different satellite)?

The Mars Orbiter Camera on the Mars Global Surveyor, from which these images come, uses a CCD line array to capture images. Unlike your digital camera, which was a rectangular sensor that's, say, 4000 pixels wide by 3000 pixels high, the MOC has a sensor that's 2048 pixels wide by 1 pixel high. So instead of capturing a whole image at once, it works by continuously capturing a thin sliver of an image as the spacecraft passes over the surface. If there is some kind of electrical noise in the sensor, or a transmission error as the data is sent back to Earth, you can see the errors in the form of lines. Such errors are infrequent, though, so you only see them here and there.

Originally posted by SpongeBeard
A...mars rover maybe...?
I don't mean to sound like a dick, but there is NO life on Mars.
NO LIFE WHATSOEVER.
No Humans are on mars, no Aliens are on Mars.
It is the dead planet. These are not tracks from ancient civilizations, these are not tracks from modern civilizations.
It's as simple as that. There is no conspiracy to be had here, Mars is just dead.

edit on 7/6/11 by SpongeBeard because: Needed to crrect!!!

Jeez SpongeBeard you sound so sure of yourself ...have you been to Mars??

Those lines look like other lines seen on photos from, if I'm not mistaken, Viking Orbiter.

As with Google Earth, Mars and Moon versions have to use several sources because there isn't one source that covers all the surface of the planets in (relatively) high resolution.

I will look for the original photos.

reply to post by IPILYA


That photo especially makes me want to take back my statement that I didn't think it was artifacts..