NASA’s Curiosity rover took a photograph of a Lovecraftian feature on the surface of Mars last week: an ostensibly rectangular and shadowy gap within the planet’s exposed rock that appears as if it leads into the Martian underground.
The image was captured on could seven by the Curiosity rover’s Mastcam as it ascended Mount Sharp. Whereas the coarse-grained black-and-white image could have conspiracy theorists over the moon, it nearly positively doesn’t show the doorway to associate degree underground alien society.
“It’s simply the area between 2 fractures during a rock,” Ashwin Vasavada told Gizmodo during a call. Vasavada could be a project human within the Mars research laboratory, and the same formation is undoubtedly not the doorway to a video game’s dungeon level. “We’ve been traversing through a neighbourhood that has fashioned from ancient dunes,” he said. These dunes were cemented along over time, making the arenaceous rock outcrops Curiosity is passing by.
Vasavada told America that the fracture is barely a few feet; once these dunes were compacted, they were buried and unburied over time because the sand on Mars’ surface shifted. throughout this method, the arenaceous rock was under varied pressure, inflicting it to buckle and fracture in numerous places. “The fractures we tend to see during this space area unit are typically vertical,” he explained. This specific doorway-shaped fracture is doubtless fashioned in one of two ways.
“I assume what we’ve got here [is] either 2 vertical fractures, wherever the centrepiece has been removed, or one vertical fracture, and also the blocks have enraptured apart a touch bit,” Vasavada same.
The Curiosity rover has been trawling around Mars since it landed in August 2012 in wind Crater. The rover has since lined seventeen.3 miles (27.84 kilometers) in three,472 Martian days, or ‘sols.’ once Curiosity isn’t collecting rock and soil samples, it’s taking photos of victimization of its bird’s-eye Mastcam (mast + camera). This picture from Curiosity is an associate degree, another example of our tendency to envision acquainted forms in an unacquainted landscape. In the past, folks thought they’d seen every kind of out-of-place thing on Mars, together with a squirrel and spoon.
