Author Topic: 'Monolith' Object on Mars?  (Read 935 times)

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'Monolith' Object on Mars?
« on: Apr 12 2012 - 02:47PM »
'Monolith' Object on Mars? You Could Call It That
By Natalie Wolchover | LiveScience.com

    Amateur stargazers have discovered an intriguing object jutting out  from the surface of Mars. The seemingly perfectly rectangular, upright  structure, found in NASA images of the Red Planet, bears a striking  resemblance to the monoliths planted on Earth and the moon by aliens in  the classic sci-fi film "2001: A Space Odyssey."
    The object in question was first spotted several years ago after being  photographed by the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance  Orbiter, a NASA space probe; every so often, it garners renewed interest  on the Internet. But is it unnatural — a beacon erected by aliens for  mysterious reasons, and even more mysteriously paralleled in the  imaginations of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, creators of  "2001"? Or is this rock the work of nature? [Photo ]
    According to Jonathon Hill, a research technician and mission planner  at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, who  processes many of the images taken during NASA's Mars missions, the object in question is no more than a roughly rectangular boulder.
    The HiRISE camera that photographed it has a resolution of  approximately 1 foot (30 centimeters) per pixel — impressive considering  the 180-mile (300-kilometer) altitude from which it photographs the  Martian surface, but not quite sharp enough to capture the cragginess of  a mid-size boulder. "When your resolution is too low to fully resolve  an object, it tends to look rectangular because the pixels in the image  are squares. Any curve will look like a series of straight lines if you  reduce your resolution enough," Hill told Life's Little Mysteries.
    The location of the boulder at the bottom of a cliff near many other  boulders suggests it broke off the cliff and tumbled to its current spot  sometime in the distant past, Hill said. Such a perilous location is  itself an argument against deliberate placement by aliens: "If I was  going to build a monolith somewhere, that's the last place I would put  it!" he said. "The debris falling from the cliff would cover it up  pretty quickly, on geologic timescales." [Vote: Do You Believe in Life on Mars?]
    Hill added that the height of the boulder is being exaggerated in the  photo by a low sun angle. Photographed when the sun was near the  horizon, the boulder casts an especially long shadow.
    The ufologists aren't necessarily wrong in calling it a monolith — the  word simply translates from Latin as "one stone." But this monolith  isn't the masonry of Martians.



http://news.yahoo.com/monolith-object-mars-could-call-214004772.html
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