A new photo taken by the Mars Curiosity rover and released by NASA appears to show a doorway carved into the planet’s surface.
The photo has sparked conspiracy theories about an intelligent alien race that lives beneath the surface of Mars.
But the reality of the picture is much less exciting.
Is there a doorway on Mars?
Professor Sanjeev Gupta of Imperial College London explained: The Telegraph that there is nothing unusual about the photo, and that what appears to be a doorway is just an ordinary rock formation.
“The fissure is a rift, and they’re plentiful on Mars and Earth — it doesn’t take Marsquakes to produce them,” said Professor Gupta, who has worked with NASA on the Curiosity mission.
“There’s nothing strange about the image at all — these are just normal geological processes.”
The image is also extremely zoomed in, a NASA spokesperson explains to fact-checking website Snopes.
The slit that looks like a doorway is actually only 30-45 cm long.
The spokesperson added: “There are linear fractures in this outcrop, and this is a location where several linear fractures intersect.”
Many times people have mistaken the regular geological structures on the surface of planets for signs of extraterrestrial life.
The Chinese lunar exploration mission last year identified what appeared to be a mysterious hut on the moon, which turned out to be a boulder.
In 1977, NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft photographed what appeared to be a face staring up from the surface, sparking the theories that Martians had built monuments, but it turned out to be caused by normal rocks casting unusual shadows.
What is the Mars Curiosity rover?
The Mars Curiosity rover is a vehicle the size of a car that travels over the surface of the planet and takes pictures of it.
Its goal is to investigate Mars’ climate and geography and help assess whether it could ever have supported extraterrestrial life.
The rover launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida in November 2011 and landed the following August.
Curiosity is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator – a generator that produces electricity from the decay of radioactive isotopes.
The heat released during the decay of these isotopes is converted by thermocouples into electrical voltage, which supplies the rover with constant power.
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