Posted on 05/16/2022 12:49:08 PM PDT by Red Badger
Image from NASA's Curiosity rover showing what looks like a doorway on Mars.
The Curiosity rover took a photo of the odd structure on May 7, 2022, as it climbed Mount Sharp on Mars.Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS NASA’s Curiosity rover took a photo of a Lovecraftian feature on the surface of Mars last week: a seemingly rectangular and shadowy opening in the planet’s exposed rock that looks as if it leads into the Martian underground.
The image was captured on May 7 by the Curiosity rover’s Mastcam while it ascended Mount Sharp. While the grainy black-and-white image may have conspiracy theorists over the moon, it almost definitely doesn’t show the entrance to an underground alien society.
“It’s just the space between two fractures in a rock,” Ashwin Vasavada told Gizmodo in a phone call today. Vasavada is a project scientist in the Mars Science Laboratory, and he said the formation is definitely not the entrance to a video game’s dungeon level. “We’ve been traversing through an area that has formed from ancient sand dunes,” he said. These sand dunes were cemented together over time, creating the sandstone outcrops Curiosity is passing by.
Vasavada told us that the fracture is only about a foot tall and that, once these sand dunes were compacted together, they were buried and unburied over time as the sand on Mars’ surface shifted. During this process, the sandstone was under varying pressure, causing it to buckle and fracture in different places. “The fractures we see in this area are generally vertical,” he explained. This particular doorway-shaped fracture likely formed in one of two ways.
“I think what we have here [is] either two vertical fractures, where the middle piece has been removed, or one vertical fracture, and the blocks have moved apart a little bit,” Vasavada said.
The Curiosity rover has been trawling around Mars since it landed in August 2012 in Gale Crater. The rover has since covered 17.3 miles (27.84 kilometers) in 3,472 Martian days, or ‘sols’. When Curiosity isn’t collecting rock and soil samples, it’s taking photos using its panoramic Mastcam (mast + camera).
This photo from Curiosity is another example of our tendency to see familiar forms in an unfamiliar landscape. In the past, people have thought they’ve seen all kinds of out-of-place things on Mars, including a squirrel and spoon.
Tomb on Mars PING!...................
There’s nothing to see here. Move along.
I see the distraction from Biden performance is working. The next news cycle will be about UFOs.
"Which One?"
"The One With The Ever-widening Hole In It!"
In other news, Martian scientists have declared New York City to be a “natural formation”.
;-)
If you stare at it for a little bit, you can just make out Elvis.
its not a door, its an air conditioning duct- which is why it’s so cool on mars
There are great advances for mankind for doing so.
Looks like a head with 2 eyes on the inside back wall
I don't accept explanations from NASA about anomalies on Mars and I certainly don't accept how the left wall of that "hole" is perfectly smooth and at a right angle to the outside of that wall......
Is it really a foot tall? I don't know since we only have the camera perspective and NASA's word .......
But it legitimately raises a lot of questions........
Is that real?
The inside and outside slope angles appear to be ~51 degrees, the angle of the Great Pyramid shaft??
job opportunity for the copter...
Is the doorway 2” tall, 10’ or what?
She looks fun!
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