Date:   Tue Apr 07 1998  18:26:10
From:   skeptic@listproc.hcf.jhu.edu
Published Tuesday, April 7, 1998, in the San Jose Mercury News
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the face in space
New Mars images refute claims about odd landmark, but controversy may
linger
By Glennda Chui
Mercury News Science Writer
PORING over pictures of Mars that had just been taken in August 1976 by a
Viking spacecraft, a scientist spotted a formation that looked like a face.
"We all had a laugh about it," recalled Michael Carr, a geologist at the
U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park who led the Viking orbiter imaging
team back then. "We thought it was amusing. We thought it would be a good
thing to show the press," which the team did two days later.
Little did he know what that tongue-in-cheek announcement would set off.
The Face on Mars has come to be known as the centerpiece of Cydonia -- a
region 25 miles long and six miles wide that holds, some say, the ruins of
an ancient civilization. The notion has spawned books, articles,
videotapes, nearly 8,000 references on the World Wide Web, endless
discussions on radio talk shows and charges of a NASA coverup.
All that fuss resulted in new images being sent back to Earth by the Mars
Global Surveyor on Monday. And the scientific verdict was clear: The
landmark in question is a geologic formation, no more an artificial face
beaming back at us than the man in the moon.
Carr said the face -- about a square mile in size and several hundred feet
high -- appears to be a shield-shaped masif, or knob with a mixture of ice
and rock flowing out from it and forming a kind of apron. This flow could
be akin to rock glaciers on Earth.
"We don't know how these knobs formed," he said. "They appear to be
remnants of an ancient landscape partly covered by plains."
Michael C. Malin, whose firm developed Surveyor's high-resolution camera,
was among the first to see the images that arrived Monday.
"That's it. I'm pretty sure that's it," Malin said as the image appeared on
his computer at 9:15 a.m. "Funny, it doesn't look like a face at all."
Later, he added: "Unfortunately, it's not going to shut people up, but
that's what we got."
To most scientists -- even those involved in the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI -- the speculation surrounding
Cydonia has been baloney.
If someone really thinks there's a face on Mars, said astronomer Seth
Shostak of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, "I urge them to go to the
store and buy a 20-pound bag of potatoes. I'm sure they would find faces
among them, but they would not think it was any attempt of spuds to signal
us."
Nevertheless, on Sunday, NASA was back photographing the Cydonia region for
the first time in 22 years -- and in 10 times greater detail than before --
with a camera capable of picking up features as small as a few yards on a
side.
Mars Global Surveyor is a $247 million replacement for the $1 billion Mars
Observer, which failed before going into orbit in 1991. Launched in
December 1996, it has already sent back some spectacular images.
The spacecraft's main mission is to map Mars, and it was scheduled to start
last month; instead, controllers decided to take an extra year to ease it
into proper mapping position, thus reducing stress on a solar panel
that never fully deployed.
That delay opened an opportunity to take pictures of four areas of public
interest this month.
What was surveyed
The first three are landing sites for the Viking 1, Viking 2 and Mars
Pathfinder missions. From a scientific point of view, they are "just
intensely valuable," said Alden Albee, project scientist for the mission at
the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. That's because
researchers can compare the information they get from the images with
measurements already taken from the surface.
>From the public's point of view, it's Cydonia that commands much of the
interest.
Before Sunday's flyover, NASA officials weren't even sure they had succeed
in photographing the famous face, saying the odds were only 30 to 50
percent.
"The pictures from this camera are spectacular, they really are," said
Carr, now an interdisciplinary scientist for the Surveyor mission. But the
target is small, he said, and there are all kinds of errors involved in
projecting where Surveyor will be at any given moment.
Uncertain aim
Add that Surveyor will be traveling at 9,000 mph, he said, and it makes it
very difficult to hit a given target.
The successful shot was taken early Sunday morning from 273 miles above the
Martian surface. While the Viking photo was taken with the sun about to set
in the evening sky, in this one it was a hazy midmorning on Mars, and the
sun illuminated the side of the face that was previously in deep shadow.
There will be two more stabs at photographing Cydonia, on April 14 and 23.
The initial plan was to aim for the face all three times. But in response
to complaints from a group that believes Cydonia may be artificial, NASA
officials said Monday that they will consider turning to other parts of
Cydonia now that the first attempt to shoot the face was successful.
That decision pleased Stanley V. McDaniel, a spokesman for the Society for
Planetary SETI Research, which asked for the redirection.
While the face is intriguing, McDaniel said, other areas, such as the
"city," are more likely to reveal a regularity of design that would imply
construction by intelligent beings.
"We now believe that it's an absolutely sincere effort. They're taking a
tremendous amount of resources to do this that they wouldn't have
otherwise," McDaniel said last week. "We're very happy with that, and we're
applauding that. We feel that NASA is showing an absolutely sincere
response to public interest. No coverup, no conspiracy, nothing bad going
on here; they're really trying."
McDaniel could not be reached to comment on the latest images, but a member
of his group didn't dispute the official contention that the heralded
formation looked less like a face.
`Doesn't jump out'
"It certainly doesn't jump out at us," said Mark Carlotto, a specialist in
image processing with Pacific Sierra Research Corp. "These features may not
be there. That's possible, and we're open to that."
But he said he still would like to see Surveyor take additional pictures of
the formation that would show it illuminated from different angles.
McDaniel, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Sonoma State University,
said he became interested in Cydonia a few years ago while teaching a class
on the theory of knowledge.
"When I saw Mars Observer was about to be launched, I thought, `Wow, I
wonder if they're going to photo this object I had heard about many years
before'," McDaniel said. Then he ran across some remarks by NASA officials
who were skeptical about the face: "I was appalled at the poor quality of
the arguments, and I started taking them into my class to critique them."
The lesson turned into a 200-page book, "The McDaniel Report," that
criticized NASA for not taking the issue more seriously. Later, McDaniel
hooked up with 20 other people with backgrounds in physics, archaeology,
mapmaking, photography and other scientific and technical areas to promote
research into Cydonia.
The group emphasizes that it is not in any way associated with Richard
Hoagland, the man most responsible for popularizing Cydonia and the face.
Hoagland's organization, the Enterprise Mission in Placitas, N.M., also
claims to have found evidence of gigantic glass domes on the moon,
technological artifacts in photos from Mars Pathfinder and links between
the Egyptian pyramids and the Apollo space program, among other things. It
accuses NASA of covering up evidence of extraterrestrial life on the theory
that the knowledge would destroy earthly society.
Hoagland told the Associated Press on Monday that the latest image was of
too poor quality to draw any conclusions. "It's like looking at a TV with a
bunch of snow on it," he said.
cont...
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