Posted by jburk to Face On Mars at May 29, 2001 12:00 PM

Just as improved observational methods eventually discredited the astronomer Percival Lowell's claims of Martian canals, maybe now a new high-resolution photograph will end talk of a human face sculptured into the planet. The so-called Face on Mars showed up in 1976 in a photograph by the Viking 1 orbiter. The low-resolution image, taken when the sun was relatively low on the Mars horizon and the features cast big shadows, showed what some people claimed was the image of a face carved into a hill.