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Odd Image from the Martian Surface

^ Careful now. Those Martians aren't as nonchalant as in that Nasa photo. :lol:

marvin-the-martian.jpg

"Those TrekBBS posters make me very angry!"
 
If the "arm" is not a trick of lighting but an actual, physical object then I would have to weigh in on some kind of unusual circumstances involved. My thinking is that the erosive power of Martian sandstorms should have eliminated any physical projection like that long ago. I guess as much as I'd like to believe I'm going to have to say its probably an optical illusion of lighting and angle.
 
Not sure of the scale of that picture. What is supposedly it's "head" is clearly a boulder or stone behind, partly in shadow. Something similar with that "forearm", apparently in a leisurely pose!

The picture below is just Robin Williams streaking through the forest! :lol:
 
Mistral said:
If the "arm" is not a trick of lighting but an actual, physical object then I would have to weigh in on some kind of unusual circumstances involved. My thinking is that the erosive power of Martian sandstorms should have eliminated any physical projection like that long ago. I guess as much as I'd like to believe I'm going to have to say its probably an optical illusion of lighting and angle.
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While it may be an optical illusion, that sort of strange shape is nothing unusual when it comes to wind erosion of rocks. They're called ventifacts and if you glance at the first page of results from the google image search you'll see a variety of similarly strange ones. Interestingly, they seem to come largely from the Dry Valleys in Antarctica, an environment that would be not too different from Mars.

-MEC
 
Could these things on Mars be a case of ventrifacts, yandangs, or some such phenomenon? This NASA photo covers 2 kilometers square.

M0102950.jpg
 
Kaziarl said:

Personally, I don't see a face. But thats just me.
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Then you're in the minority. Sadly it fell down a few years back, but that's a New Hampshire State Monument, and tens of millions of people have seen that Old Man on the Mountain over the decades.

It's a profile, see it now?

I'm in the "it's a rock with & shadows" camp. There are no humanoids running around, and even if aliens had sculpted something a billion years ago when there was a more hospitable environment it would have eroded long, long ago.

I think when we're talking about Martian life, microbes would be an astounding find.
 
137th Gebirg said:
^^^ Oh, lots! All the photographs taken by all the rovers could be color-adjusted to be viewed as if by human eyes, and many of them have.

The problem has always been that the sky was intentionally colorized to look red, making it distinctively alien-looking. When the color test panel one of the Mars rovers (Pathfinder, I think) appeared on one of the photographs, it was shown that the color balance was WAY off. A good Photoshop person could reverse the color correction and adjust for the Pantone colors that were shown on the chart to make them accurate. This was done by various independent graphic and color specialists only to find out that the sky on Mars was, in fact, blue, making it a lot more Earth-like than was previously owned-up to by NASA for unknown reasons.
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You sure about that? Because color correction for Mars wouldn't be the same as for Earth, because the sun's light is getting filtered by the atmosphere, and you'd have to account for that. I'm sure you could use the color test panel to find out what an object's true color was, but not necessarily what it would look like to a person standing on Mars.
 
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