By: Ivan Petricevic
http://www.ancient-code.com
We decided to practice a little bit of Xenoarchaeology (Xenoarchaeology is a hypothetical form of archaeology that exists mainly in works of science fiction. The field is concerned with the study of material remains to reconstruct and interpret past life-ways of alien civilizations. Xenoarchaeology is not currently practiced by mainstream archaeologists due to the current lack of any material for the discipline to study.) and investigate a strange looking monolith that has got the internet crazy. According to many UFO sites, NASA’s HiRISE camera on-board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took a very interesting image of an object on the surface of the Red Planet. The image shows a monolith on the surface of Mars which according to ufologists around the web is a artificial rectangular boulder. But lets take a bit and check out the image, the placement and lets not forget to mention a couple of things about the HiRISE camera on-board of NASA’s MRO.
First of all the placement of this boulder is very strange because it is located at the bottom of a cliff accompanied by many other-mostly smaller boulders. It is very likely that in fact this “Alien boulder” belonged to a different place in the past, and it’s current location is attributed to the fact that it actually disintegrated from a much larger piece of Martian rock, due to the harsh conditions that rule on Mars, it got to the point where it is today. The location actually speaks for itself, why would you place a monolith in a location like that, it would hardly be notices and it is in danger of being hit by other rocks.
Taking in count the time-frame when the image was taken, we have to take in count the position of the Sun and Mars respectably. According to the analyst team of MRO, the image was taken when the sun was near the horizon, thus the shadow of the boulder itself appears extremely elongated and can falsely attribute extreme height to the boulder itself.
As for the HiRISE camera of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the properties of the image as well. The HiRISE camera that actually photographed this object on Mars has a resolution of approximately 30 centimeters per pixel which is amazing when you take in count from where the image was taken, 300-kilometer above the Martian surface, but the camera itself does not offer much sharpness to capture the rugged and uneven attributes of the boulder.
“When your resolution is too low to fully resolve an object, it tends to look rectangular because the pixels in the image are squares. Any curve will look like a series of straight lines if you reduce your resolution enough,” Jonathon Hill a research technician and mission planner at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University told Life’s Little Mysteries
Even though most of us are just waiting for the moment that one of NASA’s robotic explorer finds something on Mars that points towards intelligent life, the boulder displayed in the image here just isn’t that moment. Some critics will say that the boulder itself is out of place, which it clearly is, but that doesn’t make it artificial. Taking in count the quality of the image, we cannot fully appreciate the object and so we cannot conclude that the object is of intelligent design. Here on Earth we have quite a number of extremely weird looking boulders. Here are a few that look like something man would have done, but they are actually a masterpiece of mother nature.
Goreme Valley Fairy Chimneys
The Giant’s Causeway
As you can see, here on Earth we have some strange looking natural formations, which have nothing to do with mankind nor intelligence, other than the intelligence of mother nature who is life’s greatest architect.