What is the focus of this module?
This remote sensing activity introduces students to digital images, basic concepts in remote sensing, and to software that can be used to manipulate digital imagery. Students will learn what makes up a digital image and will begin to use digital information to interpret information the images provide.

What is the compelling problem that students will face in this activity? Students are challenged to find an interesting landing site on Mars. There is no best landing site. Using the Profile tool, students may choose any smooth spot that has interesting nearby geologic features. The choice of landing site is secondary to learning how to use the tools. The activity has been designed so that students have a reason for learning how to use the tools.

Learning to use software packages such as NIH Image or IDRISI takes some time, but after learning some basic skills, students will soon begin to venture forth on their own.

What are some important technical details? File Size: Two of the Mars images are about 1MB in size. To save time, teachers may want to download these images before class or to have them downloaded to a Network where all students can reach them.

Image Names: In this activity we have changed the names of the images to make them a bit more user friendly. The actual name for the Cydonia.1 image is 673B56. The actual name for the Cydonia.2 image is 35A72. The first numbers in the image name refer to the orbit of the spacecraft. The letter identifies the spacecraft that took the image: "A" identifies Viking Orbiter 1 and "B" identifies Viking Orbiter 2. The last numbers in the image name refer to the specific frame.

Preparation Checklist--have you thought of everything?

What are some geological concepts students will encounter as they work through this activity? As mentioned in the student section, the area shown in the images is indeed thought to include an old Martian shoreline. It is a transitional zone called "fretted terrain" between the old, cratered Martian highlands to the lower right (SE) in the regional image and the northern lowlands to the upper left (NW). In this zone, the materials of the highlands occur in smaller and smaller pieces towards the NW, terminating as small, isolated mesas or mountains out on the plains. There is a regional slope in this area: the mean elevation of the surface in Cydonia.1 drops a few kilometers from lower right to upper left.

The mesas are thought to be the eroded remnants of the old highland plateau: the larger pieces look like highland materials, and the topography is consistent. The tops of the mesas (which are typically several hundred meters to half a kilometer above the plains) are essentially at the same elevation as the unbroken highlands at lower right. The mesas have been carved into complex shapes by erosion. The flat "benches" or level "steps" seen on many of the mesas are thought to be old wave-cut benches, similar to structures found in and around the site of the ice-age Lake Bonneville in NW Utah (the modern Great Salt Lake is a small remnant of this much larger and deeper ancient lake). The angular or faceted pyramidal look to some of the mountains is seen on terrestrial mountains, carved by prevailing winds. Note that most of the crests of the angular mountains are oriented in roughly the same direction, another detail consistent with wind erosion.

The plains are cut by numerous linear depressions that form a crude polygonal pattern. These are interpreted to be enormous "mud cracks" that formed in the drying sediments of the old ocean floor. The ancient mainland shoreline is indicated on Cydonia.map. It marks a definite change in terrain, from bright and rough to dark and smooth. Students might find it interesting to trace out the old beach in the rugged SW parts of Cydonia.1. It can be traced in part by looking for wave-cut terraces. The old shoreline also cuts a large (originally circular) crater in half. Details of the crater can be brought out by restretching that portion of Cydonia.1.

What about human-made objects on Mars? These particular images of Mars were also chosen for intrinsic student interest. Cydonia.2 contains the famous (infamous?) "Face on Mars" that has appeared (and disappeared!) in numerous grocery store publications and popular books on Mars and life in the universe. Your students have almost certainly seen it before. If you look carefully near X=580, Y=837 on Cydonia.2 (35A72), you can see what appears to be a human-like face in one of the rock formations. This formation has been cited many times as evidence of intelligent life on Mars. A picture of this formation was even placed on a postage stamp in the country of Sierra Leone.

Neither the "face" nor its location in Cydonia.2 has been pointed out in the student portion of the activity. It will be interesting to see whether your students recognize the face-like formation and comment on its presence (they probably will - it is quite obvious if the image is properly stretched).

Assuming your students do find the "face," it can be used as an interesting exercise in problem solving with insufficient data. In disciplines like geology or astronomy, which use remote sensing, it is difficult to perform controlled experiments as in chemistry or physics. Instead, one must act more like a detective, looking carefully at the evidence supplied by nature to test hypotheses. Observational searches like these often do not provide sufficient data to support or refute a particular hypothesis, but the data can be used to constrain the likelihood of competing hypotheses. The question of the origin of the "face" is an example of this type of problem. To really find out, we need to land there and look around. But we cannot. We can consider some potential implications of assuming either a natural or an artificial origin and look for evidence in the images that might reflect on the likelihood of one hypothesis or the other.

Assume for a moment that the feature is artificial. By any terrestrial standards, it is a monumental artifact, two and a half kilometers long, two kilometers wide, and over 400 meters (1200 feet) tall. This is about as tall as the highest building on Earth (the Sears Tower in Chicago is 443 meters tall), but much larger in area and volume than the largest human-made buildings, such as the Great Pyramid at Giza, the largest structure from ancient times, or the Pentagon in Washington, DC, one of the largest office buildings in the modern world, both shown for comparison in the image file Face 2. Constructing such a large artifact would require significant effort from a complex civilization. So:

Is there any evidence for that civilization such as other buildings, roads, or machinery? Some people, recognizing the improbability of an isolated artifact of such size, have suggested that the mountains around the "face" are parts of a "city," complete with terrestrial-type pyramids and a "fort"(X=370, Y=630). Given this additional assumption, how artificial do these other features look? Are they unique? (One reason for including the regional image Cydonia.1 is to allow comparison with nearby areas. As may be seen in the images, these types of mountains are not unique, but occur all along the highland-lowland boundary.)

If the features of the "face" are simply carved from a preexisting mountain to save effort (like the Sphinx in Egypt was), is there evidence for piles of debris or means of removal? If the materials of the "face" were either brought to or taken away from the site on the ground, it should show up on the images like the 2,000 year old camel paths to the ancient city of Ubar that are still visible in satellite images (see the JPL Radar Home Page at http://southport.jpl.nasa.gov/).

To help students investigate the "Face on Mars," you may want to pose some questions such as the following:
Are there other features of similar complexity in the same area but which otherwise appear natural?

Do the individual features of the "face" (pits, ridges and flat areas) occur individually or in different combinations on other mountains on Mars, or do such features occur naturally on mountains on the Earth? Students could consider Martian wind directions or erosional processes.

Is the "face" bilaterally symmetrical, as might be expected on an artificial structure, or is it irregular as is a natural feature? (The only other image of the "face" is shown in the image Face 2. It is stretched but not filtered so that no detail was lost from the original image. It shows a little more detail on the right side of the feature than Cydonia.2. The features appear to be only semisymmetric. This image might be given to interested students to probe the symmetry idea.)

Might the tendency of people to pick out familiar patterns like faces or figures of people and animals in complex patterns such as grain on a polished piece of wood, patterns on floor tiles, rugged mountain sides, or tree trunks explain the "face?"

Note: There is a "ring" with center near X=460, Y=650 in Cydonia.2 that appears artificial. It is a "diffraction ring" from an out-of-focus dust particle on the camera lens. It is not on the surface of Mars. There are also several short, nearly linear segments of channels or ridges that some students may think are roads, but they are the above-mentioned mud cracks and short, eroded drainage channels. It is also useful in interpreting topography in these images to remember that the direction of illumination is from the left. Thus, shadows of relatively high areas trail to the right.

From the point of view of planetary geology, the "face" is almost certainly a natural formation. However, the image data alone cannot "prove" it. Determined individuals can (and do) construct progressively elaborate chains of logic or scenarios trying to support the hypothesis of artificiality ("There are no roads or debris piles because they flew around and carved the face using lasers...."). However, each new assumption or scenario carries with it a new set of questions, but the fundamental question always remains: what is the evidence?

Resources for this module

Images of Mars: Teachers wanting to find additional images of Mars can obtain them on CD-ROM from the National Space Science Data Center. The address is:

NSSDC/Coordinated Request and User Support Office (CRUSO)
Mail Code 633.4
Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ph: (301)-286-7355
fax: (301)-286-1635

Maps of Mars: Shaded relief and photomosaic maps of Mars are available in many formats and scales. The maps provide local and regional contexts, and place names, and can lead to further studies about Mars. Specific maps containing the landing area include the Mare Acidalium Quadrangle (MC-4, scale of 1:5 million) and Mare Acidalium SE (MC-4 SE, 1:2 million). Mars maps can be obtained for a nominal fee from:

U.S. Geological Survey
Branch of Distribution
Box 25286
Federal Center
Denver, CO 80225

Providing for Reflection
Despite a limited level of commitment while working on a module, students can still experience significant learning if they enter into the reflection process. Ideally, reflection occurs at various points during the module; however, reflection done only at the close of a module can also be a powerful learning experience.