Anyone at home? ‘Doorway’ on Mars fuels alien theories
AT FIRST glance, it looks as if a doorway has been carefully carved into a rock face on Mars.
The grainy image taken by the mast mounted camera on Nasa’s Curiosity rover on May 7 this year, appears to show an opening with an arched lintel, leading to a passageway with smooth walls.
Conspiracy theorists have seized upon the snap as evidence for life on the Red Planet, but scientists were quick to point out that the surrounding geology gives a clear picture of how the formation arose – and unsurprisingly it does not require Martian architects.
A large fissure to the left of the “doorway” shows that rock-cracking events frequently occur in the region, while a boulder in the foreground appears to have fallen from the opening.
Sanjeev Gupta, Professor of Earth Science at Imperial College London, one of the scientists involved in Nasa’s Curiosity rover mission, said the hole was formed through “normal geological processes”.
“The boulder likely just got eroded off a hillslope and tumbled down,” he said. “It does not require a meteorite strike. The crack is a fracture and they are abundant on Mars and Earth... no need for marsquakes to produce them.
“There is nothing at all strange in the image – these are just normal geological processes.”
It is not the first time images from Mars have sparked theories that alien civilisations may have inhabited the planet.
In 1977, Nasa’s Viking 1 spacecraft photographed what appeared to be a face staring up from the planet’s surface, leading to claims that Martians may have constructed monuments like the Sphinx.
When Nasa’s Mars Global Surveyor flew over the area 11 years later, snapping images 10 times sharper than the original Viking shots, the “face” was found to be a shapeless rock formation. The facial features had been caused by shadows.
In May 2015, Curiosity photographed a pyramid about the size of a small car, which some speculated may be the capstone of a larger, buried megalith. But at the time, Nasa pointed out that the rock was similar to angular volcanic rocks found in Hawaii and Iceland.
Nasa and the European Space Agency have future plans to drill down into the surface of Mars in search of fossilised remains of alien lifeforms.