![]() They only have to be right once, and on the offchance you ever do run across a bear in the woods or a crab monster on Mars, you’ll have your fusiform gyri to thank for keeping you alive. The rover used its Mastcam instrument to take the image of the strange fissure, which is only 12 inches (30 centimeters) tall and 16 inches (40 centimeters) wide, NASA said in a statement. Your pattern recognition regions are not the smartest part of your brain, but they’re not designed to be. In fairness to the folks freaked out by the current image, a crab is not a face and the brain has to work a little harder to force that image out of the background shapes, but it does the job all the same-just as it will interpret a branch in the underbrush as a snake or a shadow in the closet as a monster. A subsequent image from 2001 showed even more natural erasure of the original shape. By then, however, the face had already been unmasked, with a subsequent flyover by the Mars Global Surveyor in 1998 showing it merely to be the natural landform it was-and one that had significantly eroded away at that. ![]() Even in that pre-Internet era, the image went the 1970s equivalent of viral, and later figured significantly in the 2000 Brian de Palma movie, Mission to Mars. In 1976, the Viking 1 orbiter discovered what for all the world appeared to be a face staring up from the Martian terrain. We have selected only the clearest footage from Mars to give you. This is not the first time something suspicious on Mars got Earthlings worked up. We follow the Curiosity Rover on Mars as it climbs up a Martian mountain named Mount Sharp.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |