View of
Face on Mars
New April 2001 view, MOC
image E03-00824
Viking orbiter images acquired in 1976
showed that one of thousands of buttes, mesas, ridges, and knobs
in the transition zone between the cratered uplands of western
Arabia Terra and the low, northern plains of Mars looked somewhat
like a human face. The feature was subsequently popularized as a
potential "alien artifact" in books, tabloids, radio
talk shows, television, and even a major motion picture. Given
the popularity of this landform, a new high-resolution view was
targeted by pointing the 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. 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, above, covers an
area about 3.6 kilometers (2.2 miles) on a side; the 3-D picture
is about 1 km (0.62 mi) wide. Sunlight illuminates the images
from the left/lower left.
Images Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems