14 DAY TRIAL // Who said Martians are evil? Maybe they are trying to tell us something... I mean, just look at the evidence: happy face on Mars in 1999, happy face on Mars in 2006, Big Foot only a few days ago and, last but no least, happy face on Mars 2008. This particular image was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Context Camera on the 28th of January, 2008, and is showing a 3-kilometer crater located in the Nereidum Montes, north of the Argyre basin, resembling a 'happy face'.
The Argyre basin is located 45.1 degrees South and 55.0 degrees West on the surface of Mars. Ever since October 2006, the CTX device equipping the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been taken pictures of the surface of Mars with a six-meter resolution, covering about 20 percent of the whole area of the planet. Each month, the MRO maps an additional 1 percent of the surface.
Similar images have been obtained by NASA and the ESA in the past. In March 1999, NASA published an image of a 'smiley' presumably discovered by the Viking Orbiter in the late 1970s, and was proven that it had formed in the large meteor impact crater through structural changes determined by natural processes.
A photograph released on 15 May, 2003, by astronomers at Malin Space Science Systems, shows a similar pattern. The image was taken by the Mars Global Surveyor and shows a 230-kilometer-wide crater which seems to present evidence of freshly laid layers of dry ice, common phenomenon during the winter season.
In 2006, the European mission, Mars Express, obtained an image with the help of the HRSC camera, showing another funny face. According to the ESA, the photograph has been composed from a mosaic of multiple images taken in five separate orbits around the planet. The Crater Galle pictured by the ESA, in 2006, is located 51 degrees South and 329 degrees East and presents parallel gullies, a sign of possible liquid water action in a distant past of the planet's life.