NASA photographs a bear on the surface of Mars

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona

NASA shared, on January 25, 2023, a satellite photograph of a bear’s head on the surface of Mars.

SPACE – A teddy bear traveling on March. This amazing discovery was shared by NASA on January 25. In a photograph that was released by the American space agency, we can actually guess the head of a bear emerging on the surface of the celestial body.

According to scientists from the University of Arizona, it is actually two craters that make the face of the animal appear. These form the eyes and a gutted hill suggests a muzzle. A geological formation that lies 251 kilometers above the region of Terra Sirenum, in the southern hemisphere of the planet Mars.

A collapsed hill and craters

On the University of Arizona websitethe geologist Alfred McEwen indeed explains in a scientific way the elements which compose this famous “ bear head “: “ There is a hill with a V-shaped collapsed structure (the nose), two craters (the eyes), and a circular pattern (the head)”. Because indeed, if the face is drawn so precisely, it is because the craters and the hill are in the center of a ” circular fracture “, surely covered by a deposit of lava or mud, which therefore forms the head of the teddy bear.

This is the HiRISE on-board camera, a high-resolution device capable of taking pictures of a kitchen table from space and which is on board the satellite Mars Orbit Reconnaissancer, who took this shot last December. And on Twitter, the image amused Internet users a lot.

This is not the first time that photographs of the planet Mars have entertained Internet users. Lately, the red planet made people talk about her after a snapshot evoking the possible existence of a alien door or the photo evoking a man tanning on a rock.

If scientifically it is unlikely that a man is on Mars and even less that a gigantic bear smiles on the surface of the satellite of the Earth, it is a well-known phenomenon that pushes our brain to think so. Seeing familiar faces or things is called a pareidolia. It is notably the same thing that is at work when we see a face in the clouds.

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