The Giant's Footprint has been spotted again, like it's never been seen before.

The Giant's Footprint

Theshot of the Giant's Footprint was taken by the Mariner 7, an early Mars spacecraft, in August, 1969 .

A close-up shot of the 'Footprint' also taken by Mariner 7 .

Inside the larger of the craters taken in 199 by the Mars Global Surveyor . This crater is named Vishniac.

The martian landmark, which resembles a massive footprint, was first discovered by the Mariner 7 spacecraft in August of 1969 as it flew past the south polar region of Mars.

Now, from the first representative of a current generation of orbiters planned to investigate the Red Planet, the Mars Global Surveyor has taken its own higher-resolution image of the "footprint."

The Giant's Footprint is actually two adjacent craters -- one 50 miles (80 kilometers), and the other 31 miles (50 kilometers) in diameter.

They were surreptitiously photographed in the 1960s, a week after Mariner 7 suffered a major battery failure that kept it out of contact with ground controllers.

But as it turned out, the ground controllers would save the day, and the mysterious footprint was discovered.

In the 1970s, the larger of the two craters was named "Vishniac," for microbiologist Wolf Vishniac who helped develop methods to search for life. Vishniac was killed during a life detection experiment in Antarctica in 1973.

In October 1999, an instrument on the Mars Global Surveyor, the Mars Orbiter Camera, snapped a detailed shot of Vishniac.

In the images, which are more detailed than the earlier Mariner images, one can make out the frost-covered, light areas and streaks caused by erosion.