Pyramids/Face of Cydonia and Tubes on Mars

[Cyberman]

Popular astronomy pundit Phil Plait pounded this Cydonia stuff into the ground ages ago.

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/hoa...index.html

As for the 'glass tubes', it's all a matter of orientation. There is an optical illusion very familiar to astronomers who spend much of their time looking at this sort of thing. I'll borrow Phil's demonstration for convenience:



That is actually the same picture of a crater; the left-hand one is flipped upside-down, giving the concave structure the appearance of being a convex dome. The same thing is happening in your 'glass tube' photo: an image of concave sand dunes becomes a solid convex tubular structure. Such sand dunes are a fairly common feature on Mars. The glassy appearance in the photo seems to be a contrast artefact of processing the digital image. I'll let Phil Plait explain:

In digital images, the contrast in the image has to be chosen. Someone turning the computer bits into a displayed image has to pick the brightest thing to display as white. Anything brighter than that will appear to be that same white. So if you have a feature in an image that is a little bit brighter than the surface around it, and you set it to look white, then it will look shiny to your eye. It isn't shiny; it's just a wee bit brighter.

Mars is indeed a world with fascinations all its own. Pyramids, abandoned cities and glass tubes (or worms, depending on how active your imagination may be) are, sadly, not among them.