The Face on Mars

The most famous of all extraterrestrial human-like features was first described as appearing to have eyes and nostrils by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1976.But the feature was revealed by subsequent photographs to be a rather mundane mountain whose striking facial features depend on sunlight hitting it at a certain angle. Here is the original caption that NASA released with the image:
"NASA's Viking 1 Orbiter spacecraft photographed this region in the northern latitudes of Mars on July 25, 1976 while searching for a landing site for the Viking 2 Lander. The speckled appearance of the image is due to missing data, called bit errors, caused by problems in transmission of the photographic data from Mars to Earth. Bit errors comprise part of one of the 'eyes' and 'nostrils' on the eroded rock that resembles a human face near the center of the image. Shadows in the rock formation give the illusion of a nose and mouth. Planetary geologists attribute the origin of the formation to purely natural processes. The feature is 1.5 kilometers (one mile) across, with the sun angle at approximately 20 degrees. The picture was taken from a range of 1,873 kilometers (1,162 miles)."The feature was subsequently popularized as a potential "alien artifact" in books, tabloids, radio talk shows, television, and even a major motion picture.

(Click at the pictures for full size)

Sunday morning (5 April 1998 12:39 AM PST), the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft successfully acquired a high resolution image of the "Face on Mars" feature in the Cydonia region. The image was transmitted to Earth on Sunday, and retrieved from the mission computer data base Monday morning (6 April 1998). The image was processed at the Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) facility 9:15 AM and the raw image immediately transferred to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for release to the Internet. The image shown here were subsequently processed at MSSS

Given the popularity of this landform, a new high-resolution view was targeted by pointing the the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft off-nadir on April 8, 2001. On that date at 20:54 UTC (8:54 p.m., Greenwich time zone), the MGS was rolled 24.8° to the left so that it was looking at the "face" 165 km to the side from a distance of about 450 km. successfully acquired a highest resolution image of the "Face on Mars" feature in the Cydonia region
The resulting image has a resolution of about 2 meters (6.6 feet) per pixel. If present on Mars, objects the size of typical passenger jet airplanes would be distinguishable in an image of this scale. The large "face" picture, covers an area about 3.6 kilometers (2.2 miles) on a sideleft.

Three views: Viking 1 photo from 1976; Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) image from 1998, and the latest MGS image from April 2001.

3D perspective view of the Face on Mars landform produced by Jim Garvin (NASA) and Jim Frawley (Herring Bay Geophysics) from the latest MOC image (April 8, 2001) and all of the available laser altimeter elevation measurements by MOLA. There is no vertical exaggeration in this ray-traced image. Garvin and Frawley express special thanks to Mike Malin and MOLA science team. See also these false-color 3D views of the Face with approximately 10:1 vertical exaggeration.

Is there a secret message at this mountain? Is this a physical landform or is there any chance to be an artificial megastructure left by an unknown extraterrestrial intelligence?

Rotate the original image to vertical, cut the half, make the mirror of this half and paste it with the original half and the result is a human-like structure(2nd picture below). Is this a nature’s trick or something else beyond our imagination?

Mirror Symmetry Images

Right mirror image	Left mirror image (negative)

If you have any idea let me know.

Another great mystery from the Martian area ?

The Airport Terminal

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