Resolution of photographs

The entire question of identifying monuments on other worlds comes down to a question of image resolution. The 1970s photographs of the Cydonia region do not have the resolution that is achieved for detecting artificiality in human archaeology, let alone something that might have been created by a totally alien life form. The initial claims used evidence that was simply not good enough to support the extraordinary interpretations being made. At a resolution of worse than 40 m per pixel, it is doubtful that any artificial structures could be identified with any certainty on the face of the earth, the one place where we know they exist.

The 1998 Mars Global Surveyor photographs of the Cydonia region were much more detailed than the Viking Orbiter photographs from more than twenty years before: taken at a height of 444 km, with the sun 25° above the horizon, the resolution is 4.3 metres per pixel, ten times better than the best Viking Orbiter photograph. Mars Orbital Camera frame SPO-1-220/03 clearly shows a geological formation (described as a ‘mesa’), not an artificial construction. Combining the two images and fitting them to the same Mercator map projection brings out the nature of the formation beyond any doubt: there are no signs that would alert an archaeologist to it artificiality.

The pyramids are superficially more impressive on the Viking Orbiter photographs, although their apparent geometric precision can be shown to be an artefact of enhancement. Even so, they look very unlike many of the geological formations found on Mars, although I am not enough of a geologist (or is the correct term areologist?) to know for certain. Once again, the Mars Orbital camera, with its better resolutions, allows us to state with a high degree of confidence that they do not display signs of artificial construction. The ‘city square pyramid’, for instance, has a resolution of only 3.42 m per pixel, at which scale it looks entirely natural.