Let’s start with a genuine photograph of Hale Crater on the surface of Mars, from the European space agency (ESA):
Just to make sure, I checked the web site domain, esa.int:
IANA Whois Service
Domain: esa.int
ID: esa-int
Registrant:
Name:
Organization: European Space Agency (ESA)
Address1: 8-10, Rue Mario Nikis
Address2:
Address3:
City: Paris
State/Province: N/A
Country: France
Postal Code: 75738 Paris Cedex 15
So, we are dealing with the real ESA, not some other bogus web site. If you click on the photo above, you can clearly see geometrical patterns on the ground. These are not natural.. I played with the image on Gimp, reduced brightness and increased contrast, sharpened and reduced colors:
It looks to me an awful lot like some sort of Image distortion. I’m guessing this is a computer generated image of a radar sweep blended with actual imagery? Depending on the process and compression possibly used in putting it all together, that checkerboarding looks like compression artifacting.
I thought about that.. It does look like it follows the terrain though, and I don’t know if image compression would generate something like that. I have never seen it on any other photos. Maybe someone with good knowledge if image processing could comment here?
when i first saw the patterns, immediately what came to mind was video compression artifacts (like you see when MPEGs are decoded). But on closer examination, it was obvious that these patterns are mapped to the contour of the terrain.
So then I thought, how could I duplicate this? If I had a 3-D terrain map for this region (I don’t know where I could get one), I could take patterns of 2-D barcodes, or Amish quilts, or crop glyphs, and map them onto the surface, as is commonly done in 3D rendering.
But when I looked at another photo of the same area taken from a different perspective, I was amazed to find that the same patterns are there, and consistent with the new orientation.
After talking to Leo, I have to agree with him that these are 3-D enhanced photos, not the original 2-D photos. Therefore, by definition, all the photographic pixels were indeed mapped to a terrain model, this necessarily includes video compression artifacts. And these patterns definitely look like MPEG compression artifacts.
One thing still bothers me: because the artifacts are the same in two different perspectives, then the same 2-D source photo had to be used to generate both perspectives. Yet the ESA website seems to present the “photos” as separate shots from separate locations. But in fact, these are computer generated mappings of the same photo. Now why would they do that?
That being said, there are plenty of other weird objects photographed by the Mars rovers that are not explainable in the above manner. I remain convinced that there was, at some time in the distant past, humanoid inhabitants on Mars.
Hi!
I think this picture is a 3d model with a normal map.
We can see that on the top of the picture … It’s look like a cube.
So yeah! the pathern is the same
SEMPMT0A90E
SEMCMT0A90E
The quality of this one is poor
… I cant see details. Where is the original?????
SEMTQWWJD1E
We can see details in this one. But it’s a close-up view of surface near Crater Hale -.-
+ it’s the same description … the same the High Resolution Stereo Camera and the distance … but the quality is a lot better.
SEMPKT0A90E
This is very strange