What are shark fins and crab claws doing on Mars? A NASA rover photographs both objects – for which there is a simple explanation.
Pasadena – On the planet Mars there’s a lot going on – the rovers “Curiosity” and “Perseverance”, which have been working for the US space agency for several years NASA explore the red planet – always find extremely mysterious things on the surface. Perseverance’s latest find: a “shark fin” lies next to a “crab claw” on Mars. The strange find can be seen in a picture provided by Nasa published on their website has.
In fact, of course, it is neither a real shark fin nor the real scissors of a crab. Both are rocks on Mars that look very similar in shape to the two animal tools – and they happen to be next to each other on the red planet. The image was taken on August 18, 2023, the 886th day that the Perseverance rover spent on Mars.
Perseverance discovers Shark Fin and Crab Claws on Mars
Again and again, Nasa rovers photograph things on Mars that stimulate the imagination of human viewers on Earth. The phenomenon is called pareidolia – you recognize things that are supposedly familiar in patterns or things. Well-known examples of this are objects or faces that can be recognized in the clouds, but the “man in the moon” that some want to see on the full moon is also a pareidolia.
The phenomenon occurs particularly frequently on Mars, the great emptiness and expanse of the red planet, plus the stones, which are shaped in a wide variety of ways, literally invite you to interpret other things into it. The best-known example on Mars is a putative “face” recorded on the planet’s surface by NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft in 1976.
NASA rovers photograph unusual things on Mars
Most recently, “Perseverance” has one “Donut”-shaped stone on Mars discovered. A rock in the shape of a frog, what appears to be a “floating spoon,” a flower or coral, and “partially buried skeletons” have also been photographed by NASA’s rovers on the red planet. So far, all these sightings have been caused by the phenomenon of pareidolia – but in the future, human traces on Mars could also be photographed.
Nasa wants people to live and work on Mars by 2030 and the private space company SpaceX from Elon Musk aims to colonize Mars. At the latest after the first landings of humans on Mars, one will inevitably be able to discover human traces – just like on the moon the case is. (tab)