Cydonia

What happens if you correct for the MGS spacecraft's inclined view of the "Face on Mars"?

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1817.

Source Image

Mapped onto 3D plane and rotated

Better orientation angle

Minor tweaks to above in rotation

Do it yourself...

OK, if you can run QuickDraw 3D on your Mac follow these steps:

Download TextureEyes from the QuickDraw3D tools area of Apple's QuickTime site (there are Windows tools here too).
Download this PICT version of the NASA data (MacBinary format), or save a copy of the Source Image and convert it to PICT yourself.
Open TextureEyes, it'll create a window with a cyan square inside a blue rectangle.
Drag the PICT image into the TextureEyes window to map the image onto the cyan plane.
Drag the plane around with the mouse, and see what you get.

If you can't run QD3D, or you're using a system that can't do this sort of thing, the 3 images above show what you get as a result.

Here's one I made earlier...

If you don't want to construct it yourself, you can download a BinHex version of the 3DMF file used to create the images above. This file, when expanded, will open into anything that'll handle Apple's QuickDraw 3D format (eg the 3DMF Viewer app that comes with the QD3D installer set). Check your 'Apple Extras' folder, or have a look on the installer CD that came with your Mac to see if you've got this utility already.

Failing all that, just download the 3DMF file and drop it into your Scrapbook under the Apple Menu (Scrapbook handles QD3D files just fine)...

3D image in Apple's std ScrapBook utility

...aw, heck - if we're going for completeness, the 3DMF file also opens into SimpleText (and everyone's got a gazillion copies of that hanging about on their Mac somewhere).

Opinion?

Well, I don't know about you but I think the symmetry is at least striking (but there can be natural explanations for that). Is it artificial? I don't know. It's certainly drawn our attention to an area of Mars that has, in and of itself, thrown up some interesting new ideas concerned with tetrahedral geometry and the behaviour of hypersolids as seen in our 3D + time based worldview.

I await any further images from this region with interest.

Other pages

How come some of the images released look like sand pictures?

Calculated square-root(2) grid overlaid on Great Pyramid sized mounds present at Cydonia. Draft only - analysis to follow.