Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2018

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2018 STRANGE IMAGES Mars’ strange landscapes and ‘animals’ Speaking about fake images, we cannot not dedicate a sec- tion to Mars, the planet that for excellence lends itself to graphic fakes and imagina- tive interpretations of the immense database accumu- lated in almost half a century of automatic missions. Leav- ing aside the sci-fi trash, we have chosen here to repre- sent two well-defined cate- gories: wide martian land- scapes graphically elaborated through an artistic touch, and small structures of the mar- tian surface that resemble petrified animals and that just because of their appear- ance have produced unend- ing speculations. The first category is well represented in the left column, composed of a series of artworks made by Kees Veenenbos on the basis of altimetric data pro- vided by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (one of the five scientific instruments on board the Mars Global Sur- veyor probe, operating be- tween 1997 and 2006) and processed using the Terra- gen software. In short, these are digital paintings and they should be considered as such, even if in some rare cases they seem a faithful repre- sentation of the reality. On the right and next page, we have instead a selection of improbable 'martian ani- mals' found in the recesses of the surface of the red planet. From top to bottom we can 'recognize' a wary crab climb- ing on a rock, an iguana that turns towards the photo- graphic device, a spider cling- ing to a group of sedimentary rocks, and finally a squirrel hidden between two stones.