Claim: There is a feature on Mars that resembles an ancient square structure

[ARB]

I woke up this morning to find a text message from a friend in a group thread, with a link to this reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/aliens/comments/1ie0275/nasa_picture_that_reveals_possible_archaeological/

He says that reddit suggested the thread to him. This group chat has been discussing skeptical topics lately, including some of Mick West's UFO videos, so I think that The Algorithm may have picked up on an interest in aliens.

In any case, the thread in question is titled NASA Picture that Reveals 'Possible' Archaeological Site on Mars. Straight lines rarely occur in nature, and it features these two images:

The first image is the original, and the second helpfully highlights what may be the square foundation of an ancient artificial structure on Mars.

I have been really driven by the skeptical itch lately (hence the group text chatter), so I decided to see what I could find out about this archaeological site

At the advice of one of the comments, I searched "MOC image e1000462" and found these results:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2moim1/there_is_a_very_interesting_new_semi_buried_four/
• https://x.com/maniaUFO/status/1884510973882466396

Google lens image search revealed other posts on various social media. So this particular feature has been going around in waves for a little bit, with a recent uptick.

Another of the reddit comments provided a link to the original source of the image: https://viewer.mars.asu.edu/planetview/inst/moc/E1000462#T=2&P=E1000462

Important information from that:

• The image is a very long strip, approximately north-south
• The square feature is at the very "top" of the image (which is actually the southern end)
• Taken by Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS)
• Lat/Lon: 28.088766°, 27.74899°

First, I tried to find this location on Google Mars. I remembered Google Mars existing as a kid, but it's not as fully-featured as I seemed to remember. Certainly there's not enough resolution to see the square feature, but I did find the crater that contains it by following the lat/lon in the URL as I panned around:

https://www.google.com/maps/space/mars/@28.1835296,27.0784591,368484m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDEyOS4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

So, I searched for a higher-resolution mars map and found this one hosted by Cal Tech:
https://murray-lab.caltech.edu/CTX/V01/SceneView/MurrayLabCTXmosaic.html

The lat/lon brought me to about the middle of the crater. For the record, this map names the crater 'Ramanathan'. From the center of the crater, I panned around, trying to match details from the image to the CalTech map. It took a while for me to figure out that the "top" of the image was the southern part of the crater, but after that it was easy to identify the feature at these coordinates

• 27.819079°‎, 27.604044°‎

I am very confident that this is the same feature as in the reddit post. The edges of the square are distinctive and the details match, to my eye.

One thing that I noticed was that the main 'corner' of the feature is not the clean right angle that I saw in the original posts. This is a 3D map with terrain, so I rotated to get a view from directly overhead. It looks more like 98-100 degrees from above:

Further, the CalTech map has elevation data, and from many angles, it's clear that the 'top-right' corner of the feature in the original images is the edge of a shelf that looks quite ordinary.

Based on what I was able to find, I would say that this rocky feature is probably natural, and that the angle of the MGS probe relative to the feature distorted it to look more like 90 degrees than it really is. I also think that the shelf behind the feature looked enough like the opposite corner of a square that the human mind fills in the rest.

There are still some things that I don't know. For example, the data the CalTech map claims to use is called "Mars MRO CTX Mosaic". I do not know where that comes from, or whether I should trust it more or less than the image taken by the MGS. Finally, although the MGS page provides data about the position of the probe when the image was taken, I couldn't find a way to arrange the camera on the 3D map to replicate that perspective.

This is my first post, and I've only discovered this community a few days ago, so please let me know if there's any feedback for future contributions.

 

[JMartJr]

In any case, the thread in question is titled NASA Picture that Reveals 'Possible' Archaeological Site on Mars. Straight lines rarely occur in nature...

Nature says otherwise.

Tasmania's Tessellated Pavement, an inter-tidal rock platform that looks like the floor tiles in your kitchen

https://slate.com/culture/2012/06/p...straight-lines-actually-god-does-do-that.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_pond#/media/File:Ice_formation_Water_edge_of_pond.jpg

https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/575940/view/fingal-s-cave-and-basalt-columns

Nature does a lot of stuff, straight lines are well within her skill set...

 

[NorCal Dave]

Based on what I was able to find, I would say that this rocky feature is probably natural, and that the angle of the MGS probe relative to the feature distorted it to look more like 90 degrees than it really is. I also think that the shelf behind the feature looked enough like the opposite corner of a square that the human mind fills in the rest.

Welcome to the forum. Seems you've already figured out what happens here, and you found that some pareidolia about photos from Mars creates all kinds of claims.

Claims about things on Mars due to low resolution images or pareidolia has been going on since at least the late 19th century when it was thought straight lines were channels or canals:

They were first described by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli during the opposition of 1877, and attested to by later observers. Schiaparelli called these canali ("channels"), which was mis-translated into English as "canals". The Irish astronomer Charles E. Burton made some of the earliest drawings of straight-line features on Mars, although his drawings did not match Schiaparelli's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canals

By the mid '70s, the Martian orbiters Viking 1 & 2 had produced various photos that included The Face on Mars and a Pyramid on Mars. Both of which were just the result of pareidolia with low rez photos:

And so, it continues today.

 

[MonkeeSage]

Welcome to the forum. This is excellent information!

There are still some things that I don't know. For example, the data the CalTech map claims to use is called "Mars MRO CTX Mosaic". I do not know where that comes from, or whether I should trust it more or less than the image taken by the MGS.

I found their project page has information about it and a link to a technical paper about how the images are acquired and processed.

https://murray-lab.caltech.edu/CTX/

The Bruce Murray Laboratory for Planetary Visualization has completed a 5.7 terapixel mosaic of the surface of Mars rendered at 5.0 m/px. Each pixel in the mosaic is about the size of a typical parking space, providing unprecedented resolution of the martian surface at the global scale.

The mosaic covers 99.5% of Mars from 88°S to 88°N. The pixels that make up the mosaic can all be mapped back to their source data, providing full traceability for the entire mosaic. The mosaic is available to stream over the internet and to download, as described below.

All data in the mosaic come from the Context Camera (CTX) onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). A formal description of the processing used to create the mosaic can be found via Earth & Space Science.

 

[Scaramanga]

Those highly advanced ancient Martians, millions of years ahead of us in their technology, seem to have had a bit of a problem with right angles and parallel walls. I cropped the picture to be a square exactly at the edge of the 'structure'.....

 

[MapperGuy]

Those highly advanced ancient Martians, millions of years ahead of us in their technology, seem to have had a bit of a problem with right angles and parallel walls. I cropped the picture to be a square exactly at the edge of the 'structure'.....

View attachment 76842

First question I always have with something like this is: How big is it, in kilometers/meters?
One of the comments on the first reddit link in Post #1 was that someone said about 3 kilometers on a side.
Second question would be what is the relief in the area, is this a flat region or is there considerable relief (Such that one corner would be at a much higher elevation).
Very large structures, built by humans at least, tend to be in flat areas.
Obvious problem here is that while the overall shape is kind of square the higher areas inside the square don't show any organized structure. Square grid pattern, or central plaza with radiating roads or something like that. Also while there are portions of this 'wall' still there are also very large sections with no trace at all, and a once uniform wall of that width would take a tremendous lot of removing, and where was the rubble removed too?

 

[JMartJr]

...and where was the rubble removed too?

Great point, especially if there was more than just an exterior wall there originally -- where is the rubble of the wall, and of whatever structures it would have enclosed?

In ruins here on good ol' Earth, often the rubble gets carted off to make new structures -- a ruined structure is a handy quarry for already cut and dressed stone! But if that is where the rubble went, where are the newer structures? Much of the rubble has been cleared from the Forum in Rome, for example -- but if you look around the area, you'll find a whole city, dotted with structures built in whole or part from materials quarried from the old sites.

Spolia (Latin for 'spoils'; sg.: spolium) are stones taken from an old structure and repurposed for new construction or decorative purposes. It is the result of an ancient and widespread practice (spoliation) whereby stone that has been quarried, cut and used in a built structure is carried away to be used elsewhere. The practice is of particular interest to historians, archaeologists and architectural historians since the gravestones, monuments and architectural fragments of antiquity are frequently found embedded in structures built centuries or millennia later.

An Ionic capital embedded in the south wall of the Church of St. Peter at Ennea Pyrgoi, Kalyvia Thorikou, Greece

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spolia

 

[John J.]

In ruins here on good ol' Earth, often the rubble gets carted off to make new structures -- a ruined structure is a handy quarry for already cut and dressed stone!

A good example of @JMartJr's point is the casing stones of the Giza pyramids.
Originally. the pyramids were dressed in smooth white limestone casing stones, which must have given them an even more extraordinary appearance than they have today. A few remain in situ.

Amidst earthquakes in northern Egypt, workers... stripped away many of the outer casing stones, which were said to have been carted away by Bahri Sultan An-Nasir Nasir-ad-Din al-Hasan in 1356 for use in nearby Cairo.

Wikipedia, Great Pyramid of Giza, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza
(It has been theorised by historians that earth tremors loosened the outer casing),

In the absence of a Martian Cairo near the "square" (or anywhere else) we have to wonder what happened to the hypothetical walls/ other built features of the square.

If the square had been built as a relatively simple, low-walled but large structure to indicate the existence of intelligent life to passing orbiters, perhaps they should have taken better care with right-angled corners.

As already posted, nature can "build" remarkable structures (including things of great complexity- DNA molecules, us!),
this is the Giant's Causeway, Antrim, Northern Ireland

 

[Eburacum]

Here's the original image
https://viewer.mars.asu.edu/planetview/inst/moc/E1000462#T=2&P=E1000462
I've extracted the relevant portion,

then rotated it until the 'rectangle' is parallel to the edge of the screen.

It doesn't look quite square now. In fact, the bottom left corner looks like a triangular feature, with the other details aligned with it by chance.

 

[Ann K]

It doesn't look quite square now. In fact, the bottom left corner looks like a triangular feature, with the other details aligned with it by chance.

But we don't know if the photo was taken from directly overhead or at an angle, do we? No, I don't think it's a "structure". I'm firmly in the "natural formation" camp, but I don't think its apparent deviation from rectilinear is evidence of anything.

 

[JMartJr]

But we don't know if the photo was taken from directly overhead or at an angle, do we? No, I don't think it's a "structure". I'm firmly in the "natural formation" camp, but I don't think its apparent deviation from rectilinear is evidence of anything.

I'd agree, while noting that its deviation from or approach to rectilinearity may be impacted by how flat the general terrain is, and the angle from which the image was taken, and so neither is much evidence for anything...

 

[Eburacum]

I'd agree, while noting that its deviation from or approach to rectilinearity may be impacted by how flat the general terrain is, and the angle from which the image was taken, and so neither is much evidence for anything...

That's right. If the vaguely triangular region at bottom left is higher than the rest of the terrain, then it will only look rectilinear from a narrow range of angles.