Mars Rover Makes Strange Discovery: A Stone Shaped Like an Open Book

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2023-06-04 05:11:00

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Von: Tanya Banner

The NASA rover “Curiosity” reports a strange find on Mars. The find doesn’t seem to belong there.

Pasadena – For many years, the Mars scrutinized by a fleet of robotic researchers. Several space probes orbit the red planet and examine it from the air, and there are currently two Mars rovers from the US space agency Nasa, which are active on the surface of the planet. True to the saying “who seeks shall find”, the two Nasa rovers in particular keep discovering strange things on Mars.

Often these are things that shouldn’t even exist on the red planet – that’s how the rover has it „Perseverance“ already one supposed “frog” photographed on Marshis robotic colleague „Curiosity“ has a “Tor” discovered on Mars – which turned out to be something else. Also one flower or coral as well as a “floating spoon” have already been sighted on Mars.

Mars rover makes strange discovery on Mars

Now “Curiosity” is attracting attention with its latest find: The rover, which has been rolling over Mars since the summer of 2012 and is examining the rocks closely, has discovered something that shouldn’t even exist on Mars: a book . Of course, the current find is not a book with printed pages made of paper, but a stone in the shape of an open book – just like the frog, for example, was also a correspondingly shaped piece of rock.

“My team thinks this uniquely shaped stone is reminiscent of an open book with the pages being moved by the wind,” the Curiosity team wrote on Twitter on behalf of the rover. However, the book is only about 2.5 centimeters wide and therefore a “tiny book”, as the tweet goes on to say.

A “book” on Mars – and many other unusual finds

The image of the book-shaped stone was captured by Curiosity on April 15, 2023, using the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) instrument located at the end of the rover’s robotic arm. “Oddly shaped rocks are not uncommon on Mars. They are often formed when water seeped through cracks in a rock in the past, bringing harder minerals with it.” on your website. “After ages of wind sandblasting the rock, the softer rock has worn away and the harder materials are all that’s left.”

The red planet Mars.  (icon picture)
The red planet Mars. (Iconic image) © imago/LiaKoltyrina

The phenomenon that things are found on Mars with great regularity that do not seem to belong there has a technical term: pareidolia. The term stands for a perceptual effect in which familiar things are recognized in unfamiliar formations – for example figures in the clouds in the sky or a face on the full moon. Especially with pictures of Mars, it still often happens today that something is interpreted into a picture, that cannot exist on Mars. (tab)

#NASAs #Curiosity #rover #unexpected #discovery #Mars

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