New photos show that parts of Mars are covered in a surprising number of features that look like chunks of fossilized giant reptile scales. But don’t worry. This strange structure was not created by giant aliens. Rather, it may have something to do with ancient water.
NASA’s Curiosity spacecraft snapped a photo of a strange rock while en route to Antofagasta. Antofagasta is a relatively young, 33-foot (10-meter) wide impact crater located on the slopes of Mount Sharp (also known as Mount Aeolis) within the larger Gale Crater near the Martian equator.
A black-and-white photo of the scales was released by NASA on April 14, and a close-up color image of the rock was shared online the next day by Kevin M. Gill, a software and spaceflight engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who specializes in image processing. (The photos were taken on April 7 and April 13, respectively, and are also known as Sol 4859 and Sol 4865 on Mars time.)
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The unusual shapes and dense masses of these rocks have been compared to the scales of reptiles such as crocodiles, and some have joked that the formations look like dragons.
It’s not immediately clear how many scaly rocks were photographed or how large they were, but they were spread “many meters” across the ground, according to an April 10 blog post from NASA.
The researchers weren’t shocked to see these multifaceted rocks, or “polygons,” but they were surprised by the sheer abundance of them in the area.
“Many of the rocks we drove over have incredible textures, with thousands of honeycomb-like polygons crisscrossing the surface,” JPL planetary scientist Abigail Freman said in a blog post. “We’ve seen rocks with polygonal patterns like this before, but never in such dramatic abundance.”
Similar honeycomb-shaped polygons have been seen before on Mars, both on smaller and larger scales. In these past examples, the shape was often related to the drying of wet mud or ice crystals moving beneath the Martian surface. But it’s too early for scientists to know exactly how the latest shape formed.
Curiosity collected “a lot of image and chemical data that helps distinguish between different hypotheses about how the honeycomb structure formed,” Freman said.
animal scammer
Before arriving at Antofagasta, Curiosity spent much of the year studying Mount Sharp’s series of rock ridges known as the “boxwork.” These features are also known as Mars’ “spider webs” because of the way they zigzag across the ground, and a wandering robot recently discovered a small egg-like spheroid attached to its side. (This “web” is not to be confused with the infamous “Martian spiders,” the dark arachnid-like features that litter the surface of Mars.)
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Since landing on Mars in 2012, the rover has also photographed a series of other objects, including surprisingly realistic coral-like rock formations and suspicious animals.
NASA’s other Mars rover, Perseverance, has also seen its fair share of pseudo-creatures since landing in 2021, including statuesque “turtles” poking their heads out of their shells. And a fleet of spacecraft orbiting Mars is monitoring other unusual entities, such as the “butterfly” crater and the Martian “dog” buried beneath Mars’ north pole.
Most of these animal associations are the result of a phenomenon known as pareidolia. Pareidolia is when the human brain sees or hears something important in random images or patterns.
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