Scientists exploring the surface of the red planet, Mars, discovered a fragment of the rocky planet that was grinning back at them. The face of what appears to be an enormous Martian teddy bear, complete with two beady eyes, a button nose, and an upturned mouth, smiles at the camera of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in the image released by The University of Arizona on January 25.
The adorable picture was taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as it cruised roughly 251 kilometres above Mars.
The eyes of the teddy bear are the craters on the planet and the circular fracture pattern seen in the head could have been caused by the "settling of a deposit over a buried impact crater.
"This feature looks a bit like a bear's face. What is it really? There's a hill with a V-shaped collapse structure (the nose), two craters (the eyes), and a circular fracture pattern (the head). The circular fracture pattern might be due to the settling of a deposit over a buried impact crater. Maybe the nose is a volcanic or mud vent and the deposit could be lava or mudflows? Maybe just grin and bear it," reads a statement from the University of Arizona's High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera blog.
The popular "Star Trek" Starfleet logo was found on the surface of Mars by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in June 2019. A set of odd chevron symbols were photographed by the Orbiter on a Martian sand dune in the southeast Hellas Planitia region.
The team claims that wind, lava and dunes formed the shapes on the red planet. After an eruption, lava encircled the initial enormous crescent-shaped dunes, which solidified afterwards. The wind moved a lot of the sand as it passed over the dunes, and in the end, it produced "footprints," also known as "dune casts," that show the presence of dunes that were encircled by lava.
