At first glance, the doorway seems to be carefully carved on the rock surface. Mars..
A grainy image taken by a camera mounted on a mast at NASA’s Curiosity Rover on May 7, this year, appears to show an arched lintel opening leading to a smooth wall passage. increase.
Conspiracy theorists grabbed the snap as follows: Evidence of life on the red planetHowever, scientists quickly pointed out that the surrounding geology gives a clear picture of how the formation took place-and, of course, it does not require a Martian architect.
The large cracks to the left of the doorway indicate frequent rock cracks in the area, but the rocks in the foreground appear to fall through the openings.
Sanjeev Gupta, a professor of earth sciences at Imperial College London, one of the scientists at Nasa’s Curio City Rover Mission, said the holes were formed by “normal geological processes.”
“The rocks are likely to have eroded from the slopes of the hill and fell,” he said. “No meteorite attack is required.
“Rhagades are crevices and are abundant on Mars and Earth. Mars does not have to produce them.
“There is nothing strange about the image. These are just normal geological processes.”
This is not the first time images from Mars have triggered the theory that civilization may have inhabited the planet.
In 1977, NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft photographed what looked like a face looking up from the surface, claiming that the Martians may have built a monument like the Sphinx.
Eleven years later, when NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor flew through the area and took a 10x clearer image of the original Viking Shot, the “face” was found to be a shapeless rock formation. The original facial features were caused by shadows.
The human brain programmed to find meaning in images
In May 2015, Curiosity shot a pyramid about the size of a small car. Some speculate that this is the apex of a larger, buried boulder.
However, at that time, NASA pointed out that the rock resembled the horny volcanic rocks found in Hawaii and Iceland.
The human brain is programmed to find importance in random images, a psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia.
A particularly strong-faced Pareidolia would have helped our ancestors find predators in dense undergrowth and darkness.
A photo taken by NASA’s Spirit Rover in 2008 may be the reason why people believed that they discovered Yeti in the Gusev crater on Mars. In 2013, a rock resembling an iguana was also discovered.
Scientists believe that life may have once existed on Mars, but due to the lack of atmosphere, it will struggle today. Nasa and the European Space Agency (ESA) are planning to dig into the surface in hopes of finding the fossilized debris of alien lifeforms.