text: Heres what the did, Mission controllers prepared to look again. they said Its not easy to target Cydonia. In fact, its hard work. Mars Global Surveyor is a mapping spacecraft that normally looks straight down and scans the planet like a fax machine in narrow 2.5 km-wide strips. They just dont pass over the Face very often. The first time they took the pickture it wasnt that good of a picture. This is what happened before they got the good photo. On April 5, 1998, when Mars Global Surveyor flew over Cydonia for the first time, Michael Malin and his Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) team snapped a picture ten times sharper than the original Viking photos. Thousands of anxious web surfers were waiting when the image first appeared on a JPL web site, revealing. a natural landform. There was no alien monument after all. It was a better photo then the first one taken by the viking but it had a glare and wasn't as good as the second one.