Falsifying candidate artifacts

Greg, could you give me some insight as to what this is at the bottom of the crater. It appears to me to be a cluster of rectangular depressions. Is this natural geology - if so what causes it?

By the way, this is from the ESA raw nadir image of the bottom of Hale Crater.

Contrast adjusted version:



This one has only been autoequalized:




This video shows the bigger picture of Hale crater:

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Greg, the source file for the cluster of depressions is located at the link below.

Warning. It is ~1.6 gigs:

pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/mex-hrsc-map01...hrsc_1001/data/0533/

This is a false 3d, rotating perspective video of the same feature, which I just uploaded to youtube:

[url][/url]

Anyone else with an opinion, please weigh in. Thanks.

Features like this are quite interesting, I made a collection of some of these here:

www.harmakhis.org/polygons/polygons.htm

Some are near parrotopia for example. Normally these can be cracks which often occur in a rectangular patterm, from the shrinkage of the ground as it dries out, from the weight of ice above it from earlier. Some can also be from shifting wind patterns forming interlocking dunes at right angles to each other that freeze into a shape.

Some do appear artificial though it it difficult to rule out or falsify geology when there are known similar formations on Earth like this. So they may be random variations from a known process with something Martian in geology or weather affecting them.

If a kind of formation is similar to normal geology it may still be artificial but it is much harder to make a case for artificiality.

Thanks, Greg.

Of your collection, Example #1 looks the most interesting to my untrained eye - and I would want a closer look at it. #7, also interesting to a lesser extent. The others looked very natural to me, particularly #2,3,4,5,6, and 9, which remind me of the patterns created by cracking silt, as it dries on a riverbank- after a flood.

If I had to choose a natural pattern for the example I put up, I would have thought dunes are possible, but still, these patterns are particularly squarish, and they line up well with one another.

Is there any way to determine if squarish patterns are more likely artificial than natural? Not necessarily to falsify geology, but to determine which explanation is the most likely?

You probably are familiar with the Hale Crater controversy, and the claims by Joe Skipper and others that there is or once was a city down there. If not, check this link:

www.marsanomalyresearch.com/evidence-rep...ale-civ-evidence.htm

My problem with Skipper's analysis is that the patterns he is finding are the result of some garbage contained in the color channels, which I demonstrate here:



This garbage exists in all the *.img color channels produced by ESA that I have checked, and it is only a matter of adjusting the contrast to bring it out in any place where you want it to be.

When ESA takes this noise/garbage and lays it over the rectangles we see in the more finely detailed nadir channel, we get instant cities with impressive buildings emerging before our eyes:



So, the presence of the rectangles in the original data is very interesting.

I've also found some other interesting areas in the nadir channel such as these examples below, where the crater walls look to be sculpted into recognized patterns (back to that again) - which obviously can not falsify the possibility of formation by natural geology, but are interesting to me, if no one else. One of the patterns is of a large face (mask) right beside a body:

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by marsrocks</i>
<br />Thanks, Greg.

Of your collection, Example #1 looks the most interesting to my untrained eye - and I would want a closer look at it. #7, also interesting to a lesser extent. The others looked very natural to me, particularly #2,3,4,5,6, and 9, which remind me of the patterns created by cracking silt, as it dries on a riverbank- after a flood.

If I had to choose a natural pattern for the example I put up, I would have thought dunes are possible, but still, these patterns are particularly squarish, and they line up well with one another.

Is there any way to determine if squarish patterns are more likely artificial than natural? Not necessarily to falsify geology, but to determine which explanation is the most likely?

You probably are familiar with the Hale Crater controversy, and the claims by Joe Skipper and others that there is or once was a city down there. If not, check this link:

www.marsanomalyresearch.com/evidence-rep...ale-civ-evidence.htm

My problem with Skipper's analysis is that the patterns he is finding are the result of some garbage contained in the color channels, which I demonstrate here:



This garbage exists in all the *.img color channels produced by ESA that I have checked, and it is only a matter of adjusting the contrast to bring it out in any place where you want it to be.

When ESA takes this noise/garbage and lays it over the rectangles we see in the more finely detailed nadir channel, we get instant cities with impressive buildings emerging before our eyes:



So, the presence of the rectangles in the original data is very interesting.

I've also found some other interesting areas in the nadir channel such as these examples below, where the crater walls look to be sculpted into recognized patterns (back to that again) - which obviously can not falsify the possibility of formation by natural geology, but are interesting to me, if no one else. One of the patterns is of a large face (mask) right beside a body:





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I think a lot of the squares you are talking about are from jpeg compression. It leaves out part of the image to save space, and makes squarish patterns like these. To check this try looking at the gif file and see if they are still there. You can also try loading the gif file and saving it in jpeg with higher compression to see how the jpeg compression squares form. If this is what you are referring to most researchers including me made this mistake at some stage.