Flat hill on Mars
While studying some new photos from Mars I have found this interesting one. You can see a flat top hill that resembles some locations on Earth.
These flat top hills looks like small mesas, butes or some kind of table mountains. But these terrain features are very interesting anyway.
A few decades ago, there was some similar formations found in Cydonia location on Mars. Maybe you can remember the famous “face on Mars” that made some people thinking that there must have been some aliens on Mars! But of course, this “face” formation was later explained as a natural land-form:
NASA’s Viking 1 Orbiter spacecraft photographed this region in the northern latitudes of Mars on July 25, 1976 while searching for a landing site for the Viking 2 Lander. The speckled appearance of the image is due to missing data, called bit errors, caused by problems in transmission of the photographic data from Mars to Earth. Bit errors comprise part of one of the ‘eyes’ and ‘nostrils’ on the eroded rock that resembles a human face near the center of the image. Shadows in the rock formation give the illusion of a nose and mouth. Planetary geologists attribute the origin of the formation to purely natural processes. The feature is 1.5 kilometers (one mile) across, with the sun angle at approximately 20 degrees. The picture was taken from a range of 1,873 kilometers (1,162 miles). Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Sources:
- Flat top hill photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech
- “Geologic ‘Face On Mars’ Formation – NASA’S Mars Exploration Program”. 2019. NASA’S Mars Exploration Program. https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/6279/geologic-face-on-mars-formation/.
