Live long and prosper.
let’s row a boat
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity discovered something fun while on a routine planetary exploration and photography mission. It’s a rock that appears to form the delta-shaped Starfleet logo from “Star Trek.”
as space dot com reportthe familiar symbol was posted as part of Curiosity’s cache of raw images taken on January 9, as well as the California Institute of Technology and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It is stated in the data description of the imagetaken by the spacecraft’s left navigation camera.
The next day, amateur Mars observer and self-proclaimed “celestial poet” Stuart Atkinson tweeted out this blink-and-you-miss-it event, which Curiosity’s team may well have done. he joked.laughed like a cheshire cat” when we noticed a strangely shaped rock photographed on the surface of the Red Planet.
As NASA Explained on Curiosity’s blog, the image was taken while the rover was performing “contact science on a flat block of dark-toned rock within its working space,” and the bright rock formations stick out from Mars, so even the black-and-white image It’s clearly visible. sand.
red shirt
Certainly, this isn’t the first time a strange rock on Mars has made headlines.
Last summer, NASA’s Perseverance rover was dispatched in 2020 as a kind of follow-up companion to Curiosity with a more explicit mission of looking for signs of life, and scientists were hoping to find a new model with a porous exterior. I found a strange donut-shaped rock that I had a hard time finding. explain.
Expert opinions about the rock are widely divided, and no one can agree on whether it came from Earth itself or fell from space.
“I can’t say with 100 percent certainty that this is not a meteorite, but I think it’s very unlikely,” said Jim Rice, a space researcher at Arizona State University. Said CNN last July. “The reason I say that is because in this area that we’re in, we see a lot of rocks that are hollow inside like this.”
By comparison, Curiosity’s recently discovered Starfleet-style stones are completely ordinary, but that doesn’t make them any less beautiful.
Learn more about Mars: NASA releases image of spectacular lines carved into the surface of Mars