NASA’s Mars rover has spotted a peculiar rock lying on the Martian landscape, which appears to have a human-like face.
On the far-left side of the photo, an oddly-shaped rock looks like a slightly squashed head lying on its side, with distinct features including eyes, a nose and a mouth.
The rock bears a tired, listless expression, and combined with its horizontal positioning – it looks like this Martian face has just given up.
The Perseverance rover photographed the bizarre face on September 27 while making its way through Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide region on Mars that may have once been flooded with water.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has snapped a photo of a rock resembling a human face (left) on the surface of the red planet
Perseverance — a car-sized, remote-controlled mobile lab — has been exploring the dusty basin of this asteroid impact site since February 2021.
Jezero was once flowing with water about 3.7 billion years ago, with evidence of a ‘paleolake’ and a long, lost river delta within the rim of this 28-mile-diameter crater.
The mission is for the rover to search for ancient rocks that could provide insights into Mars’ early history.
Perseverance snapped this picture using its Right Mastcam-Z camera, which is a pair of cameras located high on the rover’s mast, according to NASA.
Mastcam-Z offers a 2-megapixel quality, ‘similar to that of a consumer digital camera,’ according to the US space agency’s specs, which accounts for the crisp clear image of this rock formation.
Seeing faces in inanimate objects is a common psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia, an illusion that occurs when people see a meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.
This isn’t the first time that one of NASA’s Mars rovers has stumbled upon familiar shapes while surveying the planet’s terrain.
Earlier this month, the rover spotted a zebra-striped rock that the mission team named Freya Castle after the summit in the Grand Canyon.
‘Since Freya Castle is a loose stone that is clearly different from the underlying bedrock, it has likely arrived here from someplace else,’ NASA said.
Freya Castle measures roughly eight inches across, and early interpretations of its unique texture suggest that igneous and/or metamorphic processes could have created its stripes, NASA wrote in a statement.
Igneous processes are geological activities that are related to the melting, movement and cooling of magma and lava.
Magma is molten rock that lies below the planetary surface, while lava is molten rock that is above the earth’s surface.
The rock bears a tired, listless expression, and combined with its horizontal positioning – it looks like this Martian face has just given up
For a billion years, Mars was a highly volcanically active planet, which could have created the conditions necessary for the zebra rock to form.
The rover was navigating some ‘unremarkable’ terrain when NASA scientists on Earth spotted the zebra-rock sticking out against the planet’s dusty red surface.
Because Freya Castle is a loose stone and clearly does not match Mars’ underlying bedrock, NASA experts believe it may have come from somewhere else – perhaps having rolled downhill from a source higher up.
‘This possibility has us excited, and we hope that as we continue to drive uphill, Perseverance will encounter an outcrop of this new rock type so that more detailed measurements can be acquired,’ NASA said.
Mars neighbors the main asteroid belt and its atmosphere is only one percent as thick as Earth’s. That means it’s often bombarded by space rocks, which infiltrate Mars’ atmosphere unscathed and land largely in tact.
But the majority of rocks found on the Martian surface were formed by volcanic activity, wind erosion and ancient water flows that have dried up.