http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEM09F8LURE_index_0.html

Interesting pictures.

Great pictures tied in with the highest res. topography of the hills in that area we've ever had and obviously showing, yet again, the purely natural nature of what we see. Of course, the fact that this is a German instrument on a European spacecraft won't becalm the conspiratorial nuts, and the artifact nuts will still find something to talk about I'm sure....pity...because without the hoaglanderati going hysterical over this stuff it's actually a fascinating and beautiful vista.

Doug

The mosts recent posts were all trying to demonstrate that the "artificial" nature of the face was nuts. What I like in this view is that, unlike these posts, you can still figure out a kind of face. Just naturaly beautifull : my favorite face of the face.

No doubt the skull-like mountains will be declared to be "unfinished" faces.

Beautiful imagery, though.

Andy

Yes, very nice pictures. On the web site of a German magazine I found some anaglyphs of the face, which I did not find on the ESA website

The article:
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/weltrau...,438362,00.html

The anaglyphs:
http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,704366,00.jpg
http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,704368,00.jpg

Michael

The Mars Express image looks suprisingly similar to the images taken by Viking Orbiters, probably due to the lower resolution. The "face" was not at all discernible in hi-res images of Mars Global Surveyor. That a half of the face is missing is news to me.

It would appear, though the text does not state this in any way, that the high-res image is merely the MOC image colorized by and overlain on HRSC stereo-derived topography. Else, why would they credit MSSS?

That seems to be the case. The accompanying MEX image has considerably lower resolution. Note how the high-resolution area covers only part of the 3D image.

If the Viking Orbiter's cameras had been just better enough to image Cydonia in
more detail, would the issue of the Face have ever come up?

Personally I think there are plenty of far more interesting natural features on
Mars that valuable time and effort could be devoted to. The Face and the Pyramids
have become quite the rut and taken away from important Mars exploration.

I know I am hardly alone in these thoughts on this forum, but I just had to say it.

Just once it would be nice if the public wanted to explore a world for its own
merits rather than the perceived notion that some kind of life is there.

The region itself is very interesting. Look at the evidence of massive flooding.

If Nasa never had made the press release about Martian faces in Viking images (the happy face (Galle crater) and the sad face (the mesa)) nobody probably would have heard of it. Years ago the press release text was available at the JPL website, but I haven't seen it since.



Yes, it's hard to imagine a less interesting object.

Oh joy...CNN just picked up the story: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/09/22/m...face/index.html

Anybody have any updates from Hoaxland? Try as I might, I just can't bring myself to surf over there... ...but selfishly, I still crave the comic relief.

New Scientist and BBC Online have already had it too.

A few years ago in Antarctica I attended a lecture on glaciology aboard a cruise ship. The naturalist gave an impressive talk lasting nearly two hours. At the end, he left a beautiful slide of an iceberg on the screen and asked for questions. There was silence for a few moments, then one passenger raised his hand and said "Has anyone but me noticed that if you look at the right side of that iceberg you can see the profile of a man's face?" There was a chorus of yeses and wows...and no further questions.

I think humans must have an innate compulsion to find human faces in the most abstract situations. Unfortunately, hucksters like Hoagland have learned to take advantage of that instinct for their own profit.

I just did a look of Hoagland's website and I still don't see any reply to the latest MEX images of the Cydonia area. It appears we have the proof at last that all the features in the Cydonia area are truly natural afterall. I think the clincher is the fact that the images came from a German camera on an ESA mission. Hoagland has been accusing NASA of a coverup, but can he say the same for ESA?

BTW: The Cydonia images are the best images of the region I've ever seen!

A somewhat less avanced civilization also managed to produce "a happy face" :

http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/3_11_99_happy/

There was a pretty good general discussion about crank theories on the Moon-Hoax thread recently. Even though crank theories offer incredibly complex and unlikely explainations, they allow believers to feel superior to real scientists. To border-line personalities, it's like smoking crack, they crave that kind of exagerated self validation.

These images are truly great, and honestly have stoked my interest in Cydonia. The face believers are so far on the fringe that they don't deserve to be discussed any longer. Why perpetuate their silliness?

These massifs/mesas really do have intricate features and as was pointed out above, the face does look like a face even close up. The nearby skull looks very much like a skull. If you look at the side of the "face" mesa (not the main image but the other side), you can see the whole side of the hill seems to have slid down several hundred feet, as though it was a piece of ice. You can see where it fit neatly in higher up the hill. This is quite amazing to think about. Why would it have happened? You can also see what looks like an overhang with a shadow under it towards the lower 1/3 so this face seems to have fallen as a single unit as the MarsExpress site mentions. There is some type of loose or slippery interface at work to cause large masses to move like that. I'd like to see a closer look at this region by MRO once they take the lenscap off!

BTW, the analglyphs are in a separate page which you access from the right pane on the main article web page.

I think Hoaxland could actually make a sincere claim about the ESA being even
more tight-lipped about releasing spacecraft data than NASA.

Today's APOD has a rather impressive image of Cydonia:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060926.html

Cool...

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEMINCO7BTE_0.html

Yes, very cool indeed
Seen this way, it reminds me of Mount Kailash in Tibet. It is a sacred Mountain nobody was ever allowed to climb and People/Pilgrins only walk the loop; a little bit like in this video.
I'd love to go there