Secret base on Mars - or not. It's catnip for crackpots!
This has taken the Internet by storm.
This guy made a YouTube video of a discovery in Google Mars. "Bio Station Alpha." Whether he's serious in his monologue, or just pulling the Internet's leg, I won't speculate. He might need to have a close shave with Occam's Razor.
You can see it yourself in Google Earth, switch to Google Mars (via the little Saturn icon), then paste in:
71 49'19.73"N 29 33'06.53"W
Ok, it's just a pixelated photo artifact, but it's still fun. Except that the crackpots are taking it completely seriously.
So, there are message threads about this on various webpages. Discovery.com, and here's one on unexplained-mysteries.com, and Phage on the, uh, highly imaginative AboveTopSecret website pointed out:
The original image, before it was Google Mars-ed, is from the ESA's Mars Express orbiter, image ID: H5620_0000_ND2
If you want to view this in original form, and you don't want to read through pages and pages of tinfoil hat messagebases:
1) download the H5620_0000_ND2 file (all 350 megabytes of it, so it may take some time!) here:
2) download NASA's viewer program:
3) Once you've called the image up in the NASAView program, choose
[Large Image Selection] up top.
Then under that:
[Select Lines And Samples]
Start Line: 29950
Stop Line: 35000
Start Line Sample: 2950
Stop Line Sample: 5000
That'll take you to the pixel blip.
What you'll see is a line of pixels that's pretty clearly an image artifact, and doesn't look at all like the "base" in Google Mars.
Also, in this post from unexplained-mysteries.com by Pericynthion, the same area is shown in much higher resolution from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in January 2010, and there's clearly nothing there.
This guy made a YouTube video of a discovery in Google Mars. "Bio Station Alpha." Whether he's serious in his monologue, or just pulling the Internet's leg, I won't speculate. He might need to have a close shave with Occam's Razor.
You can see it yourself in Google Earth, switch to Google Mars (via the little Saturn icon), then paste in:
71 49'19.73"N 29 33'06.53"W
Ok, it's just a pixelated photo artifact, but it's still fun. Except that the crackpots are taking it completely seriously.
So, there are message threads about this on various webpages. Discovery.com, and here's one on unexplained-mysteries.com, and Phage on the, uh, highly imaginative AboveTopSecret website pointed out:
The original image, before it was Google Mars-ed, is from the ESA's Mars Express orbiter, image ID: H5620_0000_ND2
If you want to view this in original form, and you don't want to read through pages and pages of tinfoil hat messagebases:
1) download the H5620_0000_ND2 file (all 350 megabytes of it, so it may take some time!) here:
2) download NASA's viewer program:
3) Once you've called the image up in the NASAView program, choose
[Large Image Selection] up top.
Then under that:
[Select Lines And Samples]
Start Line: 29950
Stop Line: 35000
Start Line Sample: 2950
Stop Line Sample: 5000
That'll take you to the pixel blip.
What you'll see is a line of pixels that's pretty clearly an image artifact, and doesn't look at all like the "base" in Google Mars.
Also, in this post from unexplained-mysteries.com by Pericynthion, the same area is shown in much higher resolution from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in January 2010, and there's clearly nothing there.