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.
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.