We should admit that often, when it comes to Mars, our pareidolia goes into override. From the famous face which turned out to be a windswept hill, to bear-looking craters, to the many many rocks spotted by rovers that look like ducks, flowers, and more, it’s fun to see all these familiar things. Well, until it turns a bit macabre. The latest one reported looks surprisingly like a spine.
As always with these things, we are going to stress that it is definitely not a spine. No bones or skeletons fossilized on Mars. The answer to this comes from the scientist who highlighted the curious formation in the first place: Dr Nathelie Cabrol. On Twitter, she explains that those are the remains of ripples that have been eroded away in this peculiar formation.
Many rocks in the vicinity have some weird bumps.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
“In 20 years of studying Mars, that’s the most bizarre rock I have ever seen. I cannot wait to have a microscopic image of this one…” Dr Cabrol tweeted. Her expertise is on ancient lakes on Mars, just like the one that NASA’s Curiosity is exploring.
She spotted the peculiar formation in a Gigapan render created by Neville Thompson who took the raw images and stitched them together in a stunning and colorful collage. In context, one can see multiple rocks with weird spokes and bumps, and even more striped evidence of the ancient deposition of sediments and then of the actions of wind to slowly erode those rocks.
Since it got to Mars in 2012, Curiosity has been exploring Gale Crater and ascending the sides of its central structure Mount Sharp. The crater used to host a lake that slowly receded until it disappeared. Climbing Mount Sharp is like looking back into the earlier periods of the lake. These images were taken by Curiosity on March 31, 2023, its 3786th Martian Day of operation.
Source Link: Spine-Like Rock Is The Latest Oddity From Mars