Just found out that the 1972 'Mars face' photo was actually released 3 days after a major data glitch at JPL

I was reading a space history blog and it said the Viking 1 orbiter had a transmission error right before that famous shot, which makes me wonder how many other 'anomalies' are just timing coincidences, has anyone looked into the raw data logs from that mission?

3 comments

3 Comments

nina_taylor19d ago

Oh wow, that's actually a really interesting point but I gotta push back on that. I mean, sure, the timing sounds suspicious if you just look at the date, but the whole "face on Mars" thing has been debunked so many times by better images from later missions like Mars Global Surveyor. Those newer photos show it's just a mesa with normal shadows. And about that data glitch, you gotta remember that NASA's team back then was dealing with analog tape drives and old-school telemetry, so little hiccups happened all the time, not just before weird photos. The raw data logs are probably out there on the PDS archives if you really want to dig, but I'd bet most of the stuff people call "anomalies" is just pareidolia mixed with bad luck timing.

mark_green19d ago

Tbh @nina_taylor, my buddy found a glitch in his dashcam right before it "saw" a ghost.

eva_moore19d ago

Used to buy into pareidolia theories myself, but @mark_green's dashcam analogy really turned me around on this.

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