The HiRise 'Cube' at (nearly) full resolution.

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Details: Category: Mars; Written by Bobby Richardson; Hits: 3933

About a week ago I saw a y/t video from Tyler at SecureTeam in which he talks about Scott Waring's posting of a cube seen in a HiRise image. Some of you may have seen a video or image showing the gold-colorized cube. I also believe that the young man who operates the Mars, Moon, Space, Photo Zoom club has posted a video.

Ordinarily I take "SMOKING GUN!!!" taglines with a grain of salt, but something about this piqued my interest. So I went to the HiRise source page and took a look at the browse (extremely-reduced resolution) image. Sure enough, there's a cubish-looking structure there.

I then downloaded the full-resolution greyscale jp2 (almost 445mb on disk) and started hunting down the software that would let me open a 22191 x 54853 pixel image and clip a full-res, 200dpi, sub-section. I also found the .LBL file for the jp2 which gives technical specs for the image. An excerpt -

MAP_PROJECTION_TYPE = "POLAR STEREOGRAPHIC"
LINE_LAST_PIXEL = 54853
SAMPLE_LAST_PIXEL = 22191
MAP_PROJECTION_ROTATION = 0.0 <DEG>
MAP_RESOLUTION = 117851.61241167 <PIX/DEG>
MAP_SCALE = 0.5 <METERS/PIXEL>
MAXIMUM_LATITUDE = 85.241902274804 <DEG>
MINIMUM_LATITUDE = 84.775096891115 <DEG>
EASTERNMOST_LONGITUDE = 356.51988312403 <DEG>
WESTERNMOST_LONGITUDE = 353.9581016226 <DEG>

So, basically, this image swath is nearly within spitting distance of the North Pole.

The HiRise page is at http://www.uahirise.org/PSP_009760_2650 . Scroll to the bottom of the page for downloadable product.

The only processing I did was a bit of contrast enhancement, and I rotated the image 90 degrees counter-clockwise. because of that the lower-left corner actually points to 'North'.

Note that the round part, the 'Shield' is approximately 65 meters across, and the walls are 7-10 meters thick...