The laser altimetry data are perhaps even more convincing than overhead photos that the Face is natural. 3-D elevation maps reveal the formation from any angle, unaltered by lights and shadow. There are no eyes, no nose and no mouth!
The same article also reveals that
MOLA can measure the heights of objects with a vertical precision of 7.9 to 11.8 inches (20 to 30 centimeters). (Its horizontal resolution is 492 feet, or 150 meters.)
while
Each pixel in the 2001 image spans 5.1 feet (1.56 meters), compared to 141 feet (43 meters) per pixel in the best 1976 Viking photo.
In other words, the spatial resolution of the supposedly convincing altimetry data that "proves" that the 'face' is nothing but a hill is only about 1/100th (the precise ratio is 1/96.15) of the resolution of the best available picture, and less than a third of the best historical Viking image.To understand what this means, I took the full-resolution version of the new face picture and applied a Gaussian blur filter to it with a radius of 96 pixel, thereby effectively reducing the resolution of the picture to the resolution of the MGS laser altimeter. As expected, virtually no detail remains, and any remaining impression of eyes, a nose or a mouth can safely be relegated to the flaws of the human perceptual mechanism which tends to see faces even when there are none.
I then took a picture of well-known skeptic Martin Gardner, rotated it by 24 degrees, isolated the face and increased the canvas size so that the face would roughly occupate the same relative amount of image space as the martian 'face' in the MGS picture. I resized the picture to the pixel dimensions of the MGS picture (2400x2400) and applied the same filter. The result has as little resemblance to a human face as the blurred version of the Cydonia face. Which means that the NASA 3D reconstruction, which is based on this kind of data, is meaningless. Given the quality of the input data, it could not recognize a real face, hence it certainly cannot decide whether an object is a natural formation or the highly eroded remnants of a face.
So this is NASA's best evidence? If a scientific layperson, equipped with a PC and Photoshop, can debunk NASA's most convincing argument that the 'face' is natural, than either the scientists who produced this argument are incompetent, or they were not really trying to make a legitimate investigation in the first place. The 3D reconstruction from altimetry looks more like a sham investigation to convince a lazy press and a gullible public that the 'case is closed' than a genuine attempt at understanding the nature of the formation.
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