Ever since 2004, various spacecraft have traveled back and forth on Mars, while sending home images from the planet’s rocky surface. Mostly it has been pictures of gravel and pebbles, but then suddenly there have been pictures that set the imagination in motion. Like most recently when the craft Curiosity sent home a picture that just looks like a door or a portal of some kind.
The picture was taken on May 7, at the same time as the craft painstakingly ascended a formation known as Mount Sharp.
But a door, perhaps to the underworld, on the planet Mars, of all places?
No, of course not. At least not according to Sanjeev Gupta, a professor at Imperial College London who has worked for the US space agency Nasa and its Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) project, which includes Curiosity. Because according to him, what looks like a door is in fact just a crack that has arisen as a result of a crack in the sandstone.
– This type of cracks is common on both Earth and March. There is nothing strange at all with this picture, these are just normal geological processes, says Sanjeev Gupta to The Daily Telegraph.
In addition, the perspective is important. Because according to Nasa, the image is so enlarged that it only looks like the “door” is life-size, when in fact it is only 30 x 45 centimeters.
This is not the first time that the spacecraft on Mars have sent home images that tickled the imagination insofar as they represent something completely different from what they actually show.
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– Bild 1 of 2 Foto: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University
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– Bild 2 of 2 Photo: Nasa
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Over the years, people have seemed to see so many different things as a squirrel, a flying spoon, a hip bone, a face and a woman on the planet. However, these images – including the “door” – say more about how the human brain works, than what exists on Mars. The psychological phenomenon is called pareidoli and is the same phenomenon that, for example, makes us think we can see faces or animals in clouds. Our brain is simply looking for patterns that it recognizes, even though there is really nothing there to see.