Mars: High Resolution View of 'Face'			7.9
			A 5 km wide area just north of Mars's crustal dichotomy containing an eroded remnant of highland terrain surrounded by plains material, as seen by Viking Orbiter under evening illumination with a low Sun (left) and Mars Global Surveyor under morning illumination with a high Sun (right). In the view on the left the hill resembles a human face, but the likeness vanishes in the differently illuminated view on the right, which has ten times higher resolution.
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Image Credit: NASA
Viking orbiter images acquired in 1976 showed that one of thousands of buttes, mesas, ridges, and knobs in the transition zone between the cratered uplands of western Arabia Terra and the low, northern plains of Mars looked somewhat like a human face. The feature was subsequently popularized as a potential 'alien artifact' in books, tabloids, radio talk shows, television, and even a major motion picture. Given the popularity of this landform, a new high-resolution view was targeted by pointing the spacecraft off-nadir on April 8, 2001. On that date the MGS was rolled 24.8° to the left so that it was looking at the 'face' 165 km to the side from a distance of about 450 km.		The resulting image has a resolution of about 2 meters per pixel. If present on Mars, objects the size of typical passenger jet airplanes would be distinguishable in an image of this scale. The large 'face' picture covers an area about 3.6 kilometers on a side. Sunlight illuminates the images from the left/lower left.
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