The Face on Mars: New Hires Image Shows It’s Just a Hill
Sorry guys, it’s just a mountain, or hill (since I live in Colorado anything less than 14,000 feet is a hill). Earlier this week the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team released this image of the Cydonia region of Mars.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
This image was taken on April 5th, 2007.
The camera that took this picture was built here in Boulder by Ball Aerospace and is remarkable in many ways, not the least of which is the size of the images: 20000 x 40000. That’s a whopping 800 megapixels!
What’s more interesting is how these images are constructed. The detector is composed of 14 128×2047 arrays with 12 micron pixels. These ‘channels’ are combined to make the final image, which is taken in three different color bands, from 0.4 to 1.0 microns.
Coupled with the optical telescope, The HiRISE instrument can resolve features on Mars that are less than one meter across from an altitude of about 300 km.
This camera is dumping lots and lots of data on us about Mars, with some of the highest resolution images ever taken. I’d love to get a chance to work with a camera like this.
The data are so large, they had to use the JPEG2000 file format to make this data halfway manageable (one image is about 300 megabytes using this image format).
Technorati Tags: face on mars, HiRise, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
http://politisink.com/pics/2006/04/sleestack2.jpg
I personally think the face on mars resembles a “Sleestack.” Um, yeah, you know–those reptilian alien-looking creatures from the 1970’s version of Land of the Lost. So, yeah, Tony, don’t be a hater. That MOUNTAIN is totally an ALIEN. For realz.
Whom would believe the “new hire” anyway? If you ask me, they should fire that guy. i know an alien when i see one, and that, that, my friend, is totally one big giant heaping pile of alien. for realz.