The “Face on Mars” is one of the great modern mysteries about Mars. The “Face” first came to our attention 22 years ago, and debate about what it is has raged ever since. Let’s hop in the Wayback Machine and return to 1976. The Viking spacecraft reached Mars in July of 1976. It had two missions. One was to send a lander down to inspect the surface of Mars. The other was to orbit the red planet, within a 1,000 miles of the surface, and take thousands of pictures to help to determine the best landing site for the Viking 2 spacecraft due to reach Mars in a few weeks. On July 26, 1976, during Viking 1′s thirty-fifth orbit of Mars, a set of photographic images arived at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. One of the photographic frames, taken in the northern desert Cydonia region, showed a mile long, 1,500 mesa that looked like a humanoid face. NASA has attempted to downplay this image from the start. After showing the JPL press corp a slide of this remarkable image, Viking project scientist Gerald Soffen attempted to explain it away by saying that a picture transmitted a few hours later, of the same region, revealed that the image in the first photo “…was just a trick, just the way the light fell on it.”
Posted on: Sun, 30 Jun 2013 08:03:31 +0000
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