DiPietro and Molenaar discovered the two misfiled images, Viking frames 035A72 and 070A13, while searching through NASA archives. This latter discovery was made independently by Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar, two computer engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. However, a second image, 070A13, also shows the "face", and was acquired 35 Viking orbits later at a different sun-angle from the 035A72 image. When the image was originally acquired, Viking chief scientist Gerry Soffen dismissed the "Face on Mars" in image 035A72 as a "trick of light and shadow". In one of the images taken by Viking 1 on July 25, 1976, a two-kilometre-long (1.2 mi) Cydonian mesa, situated at 40.75° north latitude and 9.46° west longitude, had the appearance of a humanoid face. Of the seven good images, the lighting and time at which two pairs of images were taken are so close as to reduce the number to five distinct images. The other eleven images have resolutions that are worse than 550 m/pixel (1800 ft/pixel) and are of limited use for studying surface features. Eighteen images of the Cydonia region were taken by the orbiters, of which seven have resolutions better than 250 m/pixel (820 ft/pixel). Cydonia was first imaged in detail by the Viking 1 and Viking 2 orbiters. The black dots that give the image a speckled appearance are data errors (salt-and-pepper noise). "Face on Mars" Cropped version of the original batch-processed image (#035A72) of the "Face on Mars". Cydonia contains the "Face on Mars", located about halfway between Arandas Crater and Bamberg Crater. As with other albedo features on Mars, the name Cydonia was drawn from classical antiquity, in this case from Cydonia or Kydonia (/sɪˈdoʊniə/ Ancient Greek: Κυδωνία Latin: Cydonia), a historic polis (city state) on the island of Crete. The area includes the regions: "Cydonia Mensae", an area of flat-topped mesa-like features, "Cydonia Colles", a region of small hills or knobs, and "Cydonia Labyrinthus", a complex of intersecting valleys. The area borders plains of Acidalia Planitia and the Arabia Terra highlands. The name originally referred to the albedo feature (distinctively coloured area) that was visible from Earthbound telescopes. Small part of the Cydonia region, taken by the Viking 1 orbiter and released by NASA/JPL on JCydonia (/sɪˈdoʊniə/, /saɪˈdoʊniə/) is a region on the planet Mars that has attracted both scientific and popular interest.
0 kommentar(er)
