A NASA Orbiter Captured a Photo of Rocks on Mars that Resemble a Bear
Move over Paddington and Winnie the Pooh. There’s a new bear in town.
Scientists have found an unexpected discovery on the surface of Mars: a formation resembling the face of a grizzly mammal. A camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, called the High Resolution Imaging Experiment, or HiRISE, captured the unusual geological feature in December.
Usually, official HiRISE photos chalk up a few thousand views on Twitter — but as the photo was shared and retweeted in the days that followed, its view count grew to nearly 350,000.
The University of Arizona, which operates the camera, shared the image on January 26.
Two craters look just like two beady eyes.
A hill with a V-shaped collapse structure resembles the snout. And a circular fracture pattern outlines a head.
“The circular fracture pattern might be due to the settling of a deposit over a buried impact crater,” the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory says. “Maybe the nose is a volcanic or mud vent and the deposit could be lava or mud flows?”
If you didn’t recognise the face of a bear, don’t worry.
Some people thought it looked more like a cranky chicken.
Humans have a knack for seeing faces in objects
Whether prompted by shifting shapes in passing clouds or your burnt toast over breakfast, most people will have had the experience of recognising living beings in inanimate objects.
This is a phenomenon known as pareidolia.
More specifically, face pareidolia. It is “the illusion of seeing a facial structure in an everyday object,” Jessica Taubert from the University of Queensland’s School of Psychology said.
Why does it happen?
Colin Palmer from the University of New South Wales Science School of Psychology said seeing faces in everyday objects is very common.
“While human faces all look a bit different, they share common features, like the spatial arrangement of the eyes and the mouth,” Dr Palmer said.
“This basic pattern of features that defines the human face is something that our brain is particularly attuned to, and is likely to be what draws our attention to pareidolia objects.”
More than one celestial face has been captured
This isn’t the first time that a photo taken in space has had an eerie resemblance to entities on planet Earth.
The bear photo is reminiscent of another celestial face captured by a NASA space observatory in October 2022, when the sun appeared to smile due to dark spots called coronal holes.
In 2018, NASA’s Hubble Telescope found the abyss staring back at it in the form of a smiling face while searching for new galaxies and stars.