The ‘city’

The so-called ‘city’

To the north of the ‘Face’ lies an area dubbed ‘the city’ because of its supposed concentration of monuments. These principally consist of further ‘pyramids’, generally with three or five faces and therefore quite unlike any human pyramids in Egypt or Mesoamerica. The same general problems that attend the ‘D&M Pyramid’ apply here. The supposed regularity of these structures vanishes once a careful count is made of pixel numbers on the raw images and allowance is made for the margin of error in pixel size (which is 47 m on this photograph, 035A72). Moreover, the Mars Orbital Camera reveals a mountain very similar to the ‘D&M Pyramid’. At the extreme northwestern end of the monuments is the so-called ‘fort’, which, in DiPietro and Molenaar’s enhancements, gains a row of cellular structures along its eastern edge. They are too small to be visible on the original Viking Orbiter photograph, which means that no amount of enhancement can bring them out: they can only be artefacts of the enhancement process. The Mars Orbital Camera rephotographed the ‘fort’ on three separate occasions, with it each time appearing as a low hill with erosion features that include apparently recent landslips.

Another ‘pyraid’

The "fort";

The 1998 view of the ‘fort’

This page was last updated on 23 July 2007
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews