1. The clearer picture was taken by the high–resolution stereo camera on Mars Express after multiple attempts to photograph the raised area in the Cydonia region between April 2004 and July 2006 were hampered by red dust, haze and altitude.

2. The clearer picture was taken by the high–resolution stereo camera on Mars Express after multiple attempts to photograph the raised area in the Cydonia region between April, 2004 and July, 2006 were hampered by red dust, haze and altitude. «Each point on the picture has a resolution of about 13.5 meters and you can see a lot of features that you couldn‘t see before,» said Michael McKay, former flight operations director of Mars Express based at ESA‘s Spacecraft Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany. «The fantastic benefit of the European high resolution camera is that we actually take one picture but we can create three–dimensional images from it and we can look at it from any position, any angle.» The «face on Mars» photos that fired the imagination of fans of space myths the world over were first taken 30 years ago when NASA‘s Viking 1 orbiter spotted the Martian landform in the shape of a head measuring nearly two miles from end to end.