Nasa has set aside $279m for the project. A mother ship will analyse the dust and debris. The Mars Global Surveyor image was made with a higher. The 'impactor' projectile, weighing 771lb, will hit the comet's icy core at 22,300mph, blasting a hole seven storeys' deep and as wide as a football pitch. Its one of the best known cases of Pareidolia : thinking you see a structure where none really exists. The action will create a celestial firework display to mark American Independence Day. Image shows a remnant massif located in the Cydonia region. The Deep Impact mission, which will launch in 2004, will reach a comet named Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005, before firing its payload. The original 'Face on Mars' image taken by NASA's Viking 1 orbiter, in grey scale, on July, 25 1976. Meanwhile, a robotic spacecraft which will blow up part of a comet with a huge copper bullet is to be built by Nasa in an ambitious attempt to examine the nature of comets. "The height of the Face, its volume and aspect ratio - all of its dimensions, in fact - are similar to the other mesas. This eroded mesa-like land formation, located in the. "We took hundreds of altitude measurements of the mesa-like features, including the Face," said Jim Garvin, chief scientist of Nasa's Mars exploration programme. Coloured Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft image of the Face on Mars feature. The pictures are ten times sharper than the Viking images of 1976 and, unlike similar ones in 1998, they were taken on a cloudless day in the Martian summer, offering the best view yet. You start to drowse off in your chair, when suddenly the teletype. The coffee's cold and, outside, the rain drums steadily against the window. Using breathtaking photography, this highly-acclaimed video uncovers the point-by-point correspondences between Stonehenge, Avebury, Glastonbury, Giza and the. Imagine yourself in a NASA control room, late at night. See how the Cydonia region of Mars is accurately replicated at Avebury and Stonehenge in England, as well as in the layout of the passages and chambers of The Great Pyramid in Egypt. However, the first clear, high-resolution images of the formation, taken from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, show it is a rocky outcrop similar to Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock, Australia. New high resolution imagery has proven that this hill on Mars doesn't look quite so much like a carved face after all. Nasa always insisted it was a natural rock formation but conspiracy theorists pronounced it a monument built by an ancient alien civilisation. The ghostly face that stares out from photographs of the Martian surface taken 25 years ago by the Viking 1 has sparked sensational fantasies of intelligent life on the planet.
The huge rock formation in the center, which resembles a human head, is formed by shadows giving the illusion of eyes, nose and mouth. The picture shows eroded mesa-like landforms.
NEW pictures taken from a Nasa spacecraft orbiting Mars have debunked one of the most persistent myths surrounding the Red Planet: the famous "Martian face." This picture is one of many taken in the northern latitudes of Mars by the Viking 1 Orbiter in search of a landing site for Viking 2.