The "little man from Mars"

Do you want to convince yourself?

No problem! If you want to see the original NASA image (without retouching or annotations), here you can directly see the high resolution version (39.2Mb), or enlarge the image below (lighter). The "little man" is located on the lower left side.

How were the images of the 'little man' taken?

Perhaps looking at the images above has clarified the matter: the "little man" on Mars is nothing more than an eroded rock formation. But if that is not enough, let's look at some details about the image below.

Color composition

The high-resolution images provided by spacecraft and rovers are not ordinary “photographs.” They are cameras with monochrome detectors that use a series of filters (similar to those of a CCD, as in the image), whose images (one for each filter) are combined to form a single color image. In the case of the panorama of West Valley, Spirit used blue, infrared, and green filters. The time between taking an image for each filter, saving it, changing filters, and taking a new image takes a few moments. In this case, the time span for taking the images with each filter for the subsequent composition was from the 11:58:53 and 12:00:13 (local time at Spirit's landing site). In other words, the "little man" would have had to remain completely still for 80 seconds.