[NTD Times, Beijing time, April 14, 2023]Earlier this month, NASA’s “Mars Curiosity Rover” (Mars Curiosity Rover) Mars rover took a photo of a strange structure on Mars, an expert Calling it the “weirdest” structure she’s ever seen.
Curiosity has been roaming Gale Crater since August 2012 as part of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. On April 1 it took a bizarre photo.
Photos taken by the car-sized robot show spikes growing on a rock at the floor of the 96-mile-diameter (154-kilometer) Gale Crater.
The photo has sparked heated discussions online, with speculation about what the image shows, ranging from fossilized fish bones to dragon-like creatures. It has been suggested that Martian winds may have eroded the rock.
Nathalie Cabrol, a French-American astrobiologist, tweeted: “In 20 years of Mars research, this is the strangest rock I’ve ever seen. Can’t wait to get a microscopic view of it. image.”
Another commented: “Really weird, never seen anything like it, I’ve been working on images of Mars since the Sojourner mission in 1997.”
Twitter user Martin Weil thought it was wind. “Every geometric form we know could eventually be created. We just need to be patient.”
Dotty added: “On Earth, it would be a fossilized plant, say a fir branch or the back of a fish, which would hardly be a natural rock formation.”
“I’d love to believe it’s the back of a fossilized Martian dragon, curled up in its final resting place,” Liam Gunn wrote.
Other netizens’ speculations include a very fragile “fish vertebrae”, “fish fossils”, “mackerel fillets”, and “the skeleton of some kind of prehistoric creature”.
Gale Crater is a dry lake bed on Mars that is estimated to be between 350 million and 3.8 billion years old. The rover’s mission objectives include investigating Martian climate and geology and preparing for human exploration.
This isn’t the first bizarre structure the Curiosity rover has photographed that has scientists scratching their heads. Last June, it discovered some strange, sinuous structures sticking out of the surface of Mars.
These “pillars” may be made of a cement-like substance that once filled ancient cracks in the bedrock of Mars, experts say. But, over time, the softer rock eroded away, leaving only dense material protruding from the crater’s sand.
In February 2022, the rover captured an image of what appeared to be a coral-like “flower” in Gale Crater, but it was actually a microscopic mineral structure. NASA scientists confirmed it was a “diagenetic cluster,” smaller than a penny, that may have formed from mineral precipitation in the water.
As for what the latest strange image is, it still needs to be explored and explained by scientists.
(Comprehensive report by reporter Li Zhaoxi/Editor in charge: Lin Qing)