A few news outlets (such as this one) seem to have hijacked the information in this post at Universe Today about the Face on Mars, claiming that this ‘new’ image shows it is a natural formation:
Well sure – while the original Viking Orbiter shot from the 70s gives me chills to this very day, the more recent shots from the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) probe and the above shot from HiRISE offer a more prosaic view of the location as a crater-impacted Martian mesa. Each year the face gets a whole lot less facier.
But this is not news: the image was released in 2007 (and it’s easy enough these days to get a close-up look at the ‘Face’ from any angle via Google Mars – see my own screenshot from a couple of years ago for example). But I’m sure that won’t stop it from doing the rounds of the intarwebs as being ‘breaking news’. Good job, mainstream media!
Now if the reporter was really on the ball, why bother with the Face on Mars when the real story is where this Earthly geographical sculpture of a Native American with iPod came from…
Previously on TDG:
