Face on Mars or Rocky Hill? New Photo Reveals Truth

A new image just released by NASA confirms
what the space agency has said all along: That's no face on Mars. It's
just a rocky mesa.

In 1976, NASA's Viking space craft first
captured the stunning picture of the area, showing what clearly looked
like a face on the surface of Mars.

Conspiracy theorists went bonkers,
describing the image as clear proof both that Martians existed and that
NASA and the government were aware of their existence.

The new image comes from the High Resolution
Imaging Science Experiment camera (HiRISE) on board the Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter, a multipurpose satellite designed to explore the
Red planet from orbit. In 2007, the camera captured this new picture of
the eroded mesa made famous by its similarity to a human face. NASA finally release the new image on Wednesday.

Taken from much nearer to the planet and
with a substantially higher resolution camera, the features so
distinctive in the original image completely vanish in the new one. The
original Viking Orbiter image had much lower spatial resolution and a
different lighting geometry, factors that led to the optical illusion. 

The face turns out to be a mesa -- a rocky
outcropping -- in the Cydonia region that's a couple of miles long and a
few hundred feet high.

Conspiracy theorists had long insisted that
the face was an artifact from an ancient Martian civilization and the
center of a NASA cover-up. Compared to the original Viking image, HiRISE
shows incredible detail, even from its orbit 300 kilometers above the
surface of the planet, and should put to rest all those conspiracy
theories about Martian sculptors trying to sending us messages.

The HiRISE camera returns images of the
Martian surface with higher resolution than ever seen before from an
orbiter, allowing scientists to see extraordinary detail in all kinds of
surface features on the red planet.

Source:http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/07/30/highest-quality-pics-famous-face-mars/