Although a two-dimensional view of the hill does have the appearance of some symmetry, the improved image shows that it's nowhere near as symmetric as it appeared to be in the original blurry image. While those black dots of missing data in the original image gave the illusion of sharp focus, the image is now shown to have been extremely blurry. However you can see the general contours that made up the facial features in the original image. As you can see on the web page, the Cydonia "face" turns out to be merely an unremarkable hill, with plenty of natural random variations on its surface, and no longer looks anything remotely like a face or any other kind of carving. The Badlands Guardian, complete with iPod courtesy of an oil well and service roadĪs the decades wore on, better cameras took better images, finally culminating in the 2001 image taken by the Mars Global Surveyor, with a super high resolution of about six feet per pixel. The Cydonia Mensae region (Hoagland's "ruins of an ancient civilization"). The original photograph of the Cydonia Face on MarsĬurrent high resolution image of the faceģD image incorporating elevation data. Before long, to the dismay of astronomers worldwide, there was a firmly established pop-culture belief that there was a real gigantic human face on Mars, carved in perfect detail by aliens. One of it most important distinguishing features, a nostril, was only one of many black dots that actually represent missing data in the image. But what they hadn't anticipated was that some in the public thought it was actually an artificially carved human face, despite the accompanying explanation that it was just a hill that happened to have this funny resemblance to a face when the light was at a certain angle. It was a clear rendering of a human face! NASA engineers loved it they passed it around, put it out for publication, and had all sorts of fun with it. Among a number of similar hillocks and mesas in a region of Mars called Cydonia Mensae, one feature stood out. It was 1976, and Viking I was sending its latest images.
#The badlands guardian wik series#
There, in yet another series of photographs from Mars, is a distinct human face. But then, as it finishes printing the second page, your eye catches that long sheet of perforated printer paper folding into a pile on the floor, and you see something unbelievable. You've heard this all before and seen a million badly printed images. You're startled, but annoyed and as it starts hammering out its latest data, you try to go back to sleep.
You start to drowse off in your chair, when suddenly the teletype jumps to life with a loud mechanical bang. The coffee's cold and, outside, the rain drums steadily against the window. Imagine yourself in a NASA control room, late at night.
0 kommentar(er)
