In the early morning of July 20, 1976, the Viking 1 lander separated from the orbiter and successfully descended to the surface at about 10,000 miles per hour. While orbiting Mars, a camera onboard Viking I began scanning potential landing sights, beaming the images back to Earth. 20, 1975, followed one month later by Viking 2. The spacecraft Viking 1, that captured the iconic image, was launched on Aug. "The same thing can happen on Mars and produce something that, just by sheer coincidence and the way erosion has occurred, creates something that looks like a face," Grant adds.
Yet they could look at it and say: 'Oh yeah, I see how the sun is shining on that and shadows are cast and it looks like a man’s head,'" he says. "No one ever thought that the Old Man in the Mountain was something carved by people or aliens or anything else. Grant likes to compare it to the Old Man in the Mountain in New Hampshire (which fell down in 2003). This process forms a relief that then creates the shadow, making it look like a face at certain times. Different parts of the planet's surface are more resistant to erosion than others and don’t erode as quickly, leaving some areas higher and others lower.
The picture shows eroded mesa-like landforms. High resolution photos taken in 19 have confirmed that the "Face on Mars" is a trick of the eye, seen when light hits the mesa at a certain angle. The Face on Mars JThis picture is one of many taken in the northern latitudes of Mars by the Viking 1 Orbiter in search of a landing site for Viking 2. When scientists first viewed the image, they were confident it was an eroded rock formation, probably a mesa. "In fact, there was a little bit of a misconception about what kind of life scientists were trying to discover on Mars, which was relatively simple life versus complicated life forms that were carving big faces in rocks," Grant explains. The trouble, says Smithsonian geologist John Grant of the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies, is that people assumed it was a sign of advanced alien life.
#Beware the face of mars download
Once the public saw the "Face on Mars," as it came to be called, people became interested in the neighboring planet and possible life there. Download Image The Face on Mars This high-resolution image from the Mars Orbiter Camera about the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft shows the famous 'Face on Mars' in detail, clearly showing it to be a natural geological formation. I had indeed discovered some kind of artificially constructed Martian 'complex.'" The image inspired tabloid headlines like "Monkey Face on Mars" and books like Richard Hoagland's The Monuments of Mars, in which Hoagland claimed, based on the photos, to have seen "an entire city laid out - on Mars! - with the precision of a Master Architect. The photo was captured by Viking 1, the first spacecraft to successfully travel to and land on Mars. Thirty-three years ago this week, in one of the first images sent back from Mars, people thought they detected the likeness of a human face rising from the dust of the red planet.
0 kommentar(er)
