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     The artificiality hypothesis predicts that an image intended to portray a humanoid face should have more than the primary facial features such as the eyes, nose, and mouth, seen in the Viking images.  At higher resolution, we ought to see secondary facial features such as eyebrows, nostrils, and lips for which the resolution of the original Viking images were insufficient.  

     On April 5th 1998, the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft took a high-resolution photograph of The Face. 

     In a press conference on the evening of April 6th 1998, the pictures were released by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Public Information Office.  The above image was released.  For very understandable reasons, the typical headlines for the newspaper articles accompanying this image were, "NASA erases The Face on Mars."  This image has been called, "The Cat Box" photograph, because it looks more like the cat scratchings of a litter box than it does a mile long face.   This image was produced at the expense of American taxpayers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's state of the art image processing facilities.  Many people in the world saw this image and everyone looking at it would agree that it doesn't show much more than a pile of rocks.  But this image suffers from several handicaps, which researchers have corrected with standard image enhancement techniques. The first of these handicaps is that before being released, the image was passed through a High Pass Filter.  

     The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has documented their use of the filter on this image, on their own website.  From Adobe's Photoshop software we find the following description of a High Pass Filter, "High Pass Filter: retains edge details and suppresses the rest of the image, the filter removes low-frequency detail in an image."  So these filters had the effect of flattening and suppressing image details.  This is what the image looks like when we remove the effects of this filter. 

     The next problem is the lack of contrast.  The image was taken through a haze of cloudiness, which scattered most of the light and eliminated shadows.  This is what the image looks like when we increase the contrast.  

     A third problem lies in the lighting angle.  In this image, the lighting comes from a low Sun angle from the low southeast.  This tends to distort the facial features; in the same way that a flashlight held under your chin would distort your own facial features.  Because of the abnormal lighting conditions, the negative of the Mars Global Surveyor Face image looked more like the lighting conditions in the Viking Face image.  This is what the negative of this image looks like. 

     The final problem with this image is the angle that the spacecraft took the image.  The Face appears narrower on the original Mars Global Surveyor image was taken at a 45 degree off the space craft nadir, rather than from almost directly overhead as in the two Viking images.  As we saw before, Mark Carlotto had previously mapped heights on the Viking images of The Face using shape from shading and triangulation techniques, which allowed him to change viewing angles.  This process is called orthorectification.  

     Mark Kelly, a computer graphics specialist, used the orthorectification techniques on the Mars Global Surveyor image. Note the pronounced elliptical shape of the crater on the lower left.  This crater is almost perfectly circular in the Viking images of the same areas due to the view of the spacecraft.  So this crater can be used as a point of reference for correcting the angle.  

     Mr. Kelly's orthorectification technique involved matching certain points of common reference on the original Mars Global Surveyor image to the same points seen on the Viking images and then reshaping the image.  In this way he could produce an overhead view.  This is what the image then looks like. 

   This image has missing data because of the original view of the spacecraft.  Areas on the right side of The Face close to the nose ridge were either extremely foreshortened or hidden altogether due to the off nadir-viewing angle of the Mars Global Surveyor.  Mark Kelly solved this by filling in the small holes with information from the low-resolution Viking imagery, which was enhanced by Dr. Carlotto.  The evidence is far from unambiguous.  

     The Mars Global Surveyor image shows a mesa-like formation, but one that is extraordinarily regular and linear in outline for a true mesa, and The Face still looks like a face.  Every single secondary facial feature you would expect to see is actually present in the mesa.  There is an eyebrow over the eye socket, an iris inside the eye socket, the mouth that consists of parted lips.  The nose has nostrils at the end tapered towards the forehead. The regularity of the landform's perimeter suggested by the Viking images was not an illusion; it persists in the far higher resolution if the Mars Global Surveyor image.  

     But does this enhanced image of the Face retain its hominid/feline fusion properties?  You be the judge.

     According to some Jet Propulsion Laboratories employees, since the original Mars Global Surveyor image doesn't look like a face, then it is irrelevant whether or not the "Catbox Image" was fraudulent.