(Livescience.com)
Now that Google Mars, a new online map pieced together from satellite images of the Red Planet, is up and running, space enthusiasts the world over are finding interesting objects on the Martian surface.
The latest is a face found by an Italian named Matteo Ianneo, who has also claimed to have found vegetation, entrances to underground tunnels, and city ruins on Mars in the past few weeks. Ianneo says his latest surface find, which is located at 33°12’29.82″N, 12°55’51.21″W, looks like a picture of Mahatma Gandhi in profile.
It is reminiscent of the Face on Mars, a hill photographed by NASA’s Viking 1 probe in 1976 that, in one low-resolution image, resembled a face. Within days of its discovery, space hobbyists were speculating that the structure was man-made and had been built by ancient Martians. A higher-resolution image taken of the “face” last year by NASA’s HiRISE camera revealed a rugged hill. [Read: Seeing Things On Mars: A History of Martian Illusions]
A similar low-res deception is at work this time around.
To help sort out just what Ianneo is looking at, Jonathan Hill, a researcher at the Arizona State University Mars Space Flight Facility, which owns and operates a databas… >>>
