A stone monolith on Mars

In July 2009, the Lunar Explorer Italia website published the first image that appears on these lines. It shows what appears to be a rock monument in the form of rectangular monolith.

Nothing too mysterious if not, of course, by the fact that the photograph was taken on Mars, and also one of the best tools we have there: the camera’s high resolution HiRISE mission Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, NASA .

From there, things went off and the picture became part of the collection of "evidence" of the existence of an ancient Martian civilization. Did little to barely a month later, in August 2009, researchers at the University of Arizona, who obtained the same
image, ensure that it was simply unremarkable rock, the result of a landslide in the hills in whose very basis is the "monolith".

Every so often, the image re-published on the Internet as if it were a novelty, and history repeats itself, but each time with new additions. However, there are reasons and more than conclusive evidence that this is not an artificial structure. Nor, of course,
a mock Martian monolith on the moon appears in the unforgettable Kubrick film "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Explains Jonathon Hill, a researcher at the University of Arizona in charge of processing the images of the Mars missions, the object in question is not just a rock without mystery. And also it is not even perfectly rectangular.

But look. The HiRISE instrument, a camera 40 million dollars and that is the best ever embarked on an interplanetary mission, has a resolution of approximately 30 cm. per pixel, which is impressive when you consider that your photos are taken, usually from
about 300 km. above the Martian soil.

Despite this, the camera resolution is not sufficient to reveal details such as the convolutions of a rock of medium size. "When the resolution is too low to resolve an object-Hill says he tends to look rectangular, because the image pixels are square."

And then there’s the location of the rock, just at the foot of a hill and close to many other rocks (see image above), suggesting that at some time in the past a part of the hill collapsed. Anyway, jokes Hills a dangerous place to build anything there deliberately,
"If I were to build a monolith somewhere, that would be the last place I would choose. Indeed, the falling debris of the hill would eventually cover everything very quickly. "

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Posted by Fouad Ashraf on Apr 16 2012. Filed under World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry