Posted on 04/09/2014 4:59:38 AM PDT by 12th_Monkey
Scientists are throwing cold water on yet another purported "alien" sighting by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. Though UFO enthusiasts may beg to differ, mission team members say bright flashes of light visible in Mars photos taken by the Curiosity rover on April 2 and April 3 almost certainly have a perfectly ordinary explanation.
"One possibility is that the light is the glint from a rock surface reflecting the sun. When these images were taken each day, the sun was in the same direction as the bright spot, west-northwest from the rover, and relatively low in the sky," Justin Maki, the lead for Curiosity's engineering cameras, told Space.com via email.
"The rover science team is also looking at the possibility that the bright spots could be sunlight reaching the camera's CCD [charge-coupled device] directly through a vent hole in the camera housing, which has happened previously on other cameras on Curiosity and other Mars rovers when the geometry of the incoming sunlight relative to the camera is precisely aligned," added Maki, who is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We think it's either a vent-hole light leak or a glinty rock."
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Checkout the full article.
Personally I thought it looked like a small dust devil catching the light.
Starbucks always turns their lights on at dusk....
Just to link to, previous.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3142150/posts
What does General McInerney think?
I thought it might be a plume from some sort of out gassing event that caught the sun just right. But dust devil is a much better explanation.
LOL!!
Let the Great Martian Gold Rush begin...
Swamp gas
The photo posted here appears to resemble ‘Star Trek’s - beam me up Scotty’
It looks like a luminous jet or plume of some sort. If it’s reflected glint, it should only be visible during a brief time of day when the sun angle is just right.
ET is phoning home.
Most likely that is a reflection from the flag the astronauts left there.
Thats a reasonable explanation. That would explain why itlooks like a column, but red dust of Mars I don’t think would have that kind of reflectivity.
Well, they are everywhere, so why not.
Good, at least someone else thinks it’s an interesting story too
Wouldn’t know. Working on my ESP, not their yet.
Ha! maybe
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