The purpose of the first several human missions to Mars will be to follow up on the robotic explorations and to answer, above all, the question of whether or not the Red Planet has ever harbored life. In this process, the earlier missions of Mariner 9 and Viking l and 2 recorded landforms that suggested questionable details of earlier life.The Book of Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch® was the first book to ever publish unique landforms on Mars, specifically the four tetrahedral structure on the Elysium Quadrangle. The Academy also published the first Viking pictures materials regarding the unique artifacts in the Cydonia area including the so-called Face of Mars.
Twenty-one years later, on April 7, 1998, Guard Hall from NASA’s Deep Space Network system at Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena, California, and I had the opportunity to view some of the first pictures sent back to earth from the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) which showed that the Cydonia region of “the Face” no longer matched the earlier suppositions drawn from the Viking data on the classical proportions of the Face.
In other words, a careful juxtaposition of the earlier pictures of the Face provided by Viking in July of 1976 (e.g., 35A72) and the pictures of the six different sun angles with the new pictures from the MGS project show that the details of the so-called Mars Face, enhanced by Vincent Di Pietro at Goddard Space Flight Center through his starburst pixel interweave process in the late 1970s and early 1980s, are not confirmed by the use of the new spaceborne technology, which has the capability of imaging surface features down to a level of l.5 meters.
The lack of “evidence” of the face form at this site does not subtract, however, from the pyramidal anomalies in the Cydonia region, and the repeatable pyramidal forms in the Elysium Quadrangle. No doubt that final proof would have to wait until an international team of experts had the opportunity to land physically and do “subsurface surveys” of the Mars sites and completely review the pros and cons of all of the Martian artifacts, not only those in Cydonia, but also those in the Elysium region that exhibit massive pyramidal features.
It is hoped that NASA and specialists from other countries will now have an opportunity in the coming years to look at all the important landforms and to carry through to confirm or disconfirm the artificiality hypothesis.
On future Mars manned expeditions, photorealistic terrain modeling capabilities will be utilized even more extensively to study details of the surrounding landforms and suggested “roadways” or “radar river alignments” of the larger area.
Here are some of the important orbits and initial findings of the MGS that must be resolved by better imaging:
Orbit 258, Range 409.53 km; Resolution 3.46m/pixel — has a swath of enhanced visualization covering an area of: 3.5 km x 33.2 km, taken on April 23, 1998, and shows an unusual horse-shoe geometry at the base of a 5-sided pyramidal form.
Orbit 239, Range 331.07 km; Resolution 2.5m/pixel — has a swath of enhanced visualization covering an area of 2.5 km x 24 km, taken on April 14, 1998, and shows a missing data section near a region where there is an unusual hexagonal formation in a crater.
Orbit 220, Range 441.21 km; (see left) Resolution 4.32m/pixel — has a swath of enhanced visualization covering an area of 4.42 km x41.5 km, taken on April 5, 1998, and shows a strange geometry with 21 white lines in parallel alignment
In addition, the possibility of “extra-solar activity” on or around the Martian surface by other technology that may have been involved with the tracking and the loss of the Russian spacecraft in March of 1989prior to the mapping orbit of Phobos 2 should not be discounted. This was the subject of special programs we did on the Soviet Phobos 2 and the American Mars Observer Missions in 1993 and should not be connected with the attempts to secure images at only one site like the Cydonia at this time, since the phenomenon of parallel evolution by definition cannot be localized in one area.
It must be remembered that as a scientific question, final proof of artificiality may have to await “ground truth” — that is, a mission carrying astronauts/cosmonauts to several areas of Mars to review face-to-face the details of many different landforms that were seen as anomalies when called to our attention by imaging specialists in the 1980s. But what we see in the next years from the Mars Rovers, and orbiters such as Odyssey and Surveyor, with careful analysis, may well be the stimulus that leads to the first all-important mission of realizing that we are the “new Martians” in the colonization of our Solar System.
It is my firm belief that we now possess the drilling technology (through Patrick Whittome and others from Europe who can reactivate the Hydrosphere of Mars) and Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) that could finally confirm the record of parallel life on Mars within 12 months of any time a decision is made to land humans on Mars.
Until humans arrive, software engineers have developed intelligent mechanistic robots who act as dune drivers that will collect panoramic images in a small section of the ground with a stereo camera and, with the assistance of earth-based engineers, allow for patching the pictures together into a 3-D virtual environment using software and an advanced VR interface called Marsmap. A small rover with a stereo camera that collects images of geologic terrain will be able to range as far as 100 kilometers from the landing vehicle. As the images of particular sites are gathered, they will become a rich resource for researchers wishing to explore particular landscapes of Mars in detail.
In navigating Marsmap visualizations, users can either look at the computer screen directly or immerse themselves in scenes by wearing 3-D glasses or head-mounted virtual binoculars. Explorers will be able to fly freely through the visual model, zooming towards or away from any location, rotating around a given point, and viewing objects from different vantage points.
The hard-hitting questions as evidence of earlier life on Mars cannot be answered by one or two fly-over missions or a few rovers and can only be put to rest if the international space agencies begin to take a serious look at the equatorial areas as former faces of vast water flow and the mechanisms for primordial organo-synthesis possibilities for the presence of life, or in the so-called “Inca City” region, where honeycomb configurations of geological cells and water-lines remind one of similar regions reviewed by radar experts over Guatemala and Belize in the late 1970s that confirmed man-made canals.
If we launch in October 2011 (the first human crew will arrive in April 2012) or as late as 2020, with a host of inflatable structures, life will be in full swing for the first permanent Martian colony to tap into the subterranean water oases by August. On Mars the date will be Leo 24, XXIX, thirty-six years since the Viking cameras first saw the “face” at the height of the northern Martian spring. The weather will be cool at its best, with clear skies and slightly strong winds, and the “face” that looks back upon Mother Earth will be our own. §
— JJH
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