Rocks and soil brought back to Earth from Mars by a future space mission should be handled as if they were chock full of deadly microbes, even though they will almost certainly prove lifeless, a panel of experts said yesterday.
May 29th, 2001
Those Eyes? That Face? The New York Times
Just as improved observational methods eventually discredited the astronomer Percival Lowell’s claims of Martian canals, maybe now a new high-resolution photograph will end talk of a human face sculptured into the planet. The so-called Face on Mars showed up in 1976 in a photograph by the Viking 1 orbiter. The low-resolution image, taken when the sun was relatively low on the Mars horizon and the features cast big shadows, showed what some people claimed was the image of a face carved into a hill.