What The Heck Is This Thing On Mars?

A NASA image of Mars being passed around on social media over the weekend has imaginations running wild.

The photo shows a stone formation in front of what may be a kind of cave. Some say it looks a bit like a crab monster straight out of a science fiction tale. Here’s a closer look: But don’t worry, future missions to Mars are unlikely to encounter any crab monsters.

Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer and Director of the Center for SETI Research, said he gets images showing formations such as this one about once a week.

“Those that send them to me are generally quite excited, as they claim that these frequently resemble SOMETHING you wouldn’t expect to find on the rusty, dusty surface of the Red Planet,” he said via email. “It’s usually some sort of animal, but occasionally even weirder objects such as automobile parts. Maybe they think there are cars on Mars.”

He said it’s really just a phenomenon called pareidolia, or the brain’s ability to make shapes out of random objects — like seeing animals in clouds.

“Far from being a vision defect, pareidolia has a lot of survival value if you need to quickly spot predators in the jungle, for instance,” he wrote.

He added:

“Recognizing a crab in a landscape filled with wind-weathered rocks is no more surprising — nor more significant — than seeing a winking face in a semi-colon followed by a parenthesis. “

That means that this, taken from the same image, isn’t a Martian sand yeti — or maybe a very lost wampa — peeking out from behind some rocks either: There may be no evidence for life on Mars — yet — but you can do more than scan images to help the hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence. UC Berkeley’s SETI@Home allows you to put your computer’s spare processing power to work analyzing narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space.

Learn more here.

Best Space shots ever taken:

 

 

The crescent planet Neptune and its crescent moon Triton, as seen by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989.ce Photos

 

Australian National University astrophysicist Brian Schmidt chose this Hubble photo of Supernova SN 1994D as his favorite space image, which he called “the poster child of a type Ia supernovae.”

 

This photo, called “Earth From Mars,” was taken by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit on March 8, 2004. It was the first image of Earth seen from the surface of a planet beyond the moon.is is the first image ever taken of Earth from the surface of a planet beyond the Moon. It was taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit one hour before sunrise on the 63rd Martian day, or sol, of its mission. (March 8, 2004)The image is a mosaic of images taken by the rover’s navigation camera showing a broad view of the sky, and an image taken by the rover’s panoramic camera of Earth. The contrast in the panoramic camera image was increased two times to make Earth easier to see.The inset shows a combination of four panoramic camera images zoomed in on Earth. The arrow points to Earth. Earth was too faint to be detected in images taken with the panoramic camera’s color filters.Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell/Texas A&M

 

This photo shows helmets and spacesuits covered in lunar dust after the last manned moonwalk, from the 1972 Apollo 17 mission.

 

“Earthrise,” the first picture taken of planet Earth by people orbiting the moon. This shot was captured by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders on December 24, 1968, as his spacecraft became the first to fly around the moon.

 

This photo was among the first images taken by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite.

 

This seminal 1995 image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Called the Hubble Deep Field, it collected light over many hours to reveal the deepest view of the universe yet, which included thousands of distant galaxies.

Source: Huffington Post