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Face on Mars Revealed

Dreams of a grand Martian civilization crumbled to dust when Mars Global Surveyor captured this image of the "face on Mars" in April. The site is an eroded mesa, with rocky outcroppings marking several of the features of the face. Nearby cloud cover softened the daylight, so there were no harsh shadows like those in the famous Viking images from the 1970s. The Global Surveyor image is about 10 times sharper than the best Viking picture. Global Surveyor (left) and Viking (right) images are shown to the same scale.

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