Yogi, Paddington and Winnie the Pooh, transfer over. There is a new bear on the town. Or on Mars, anyway.
The beaming face of a cute-looking teddy bear seems to have been carved into the floor of our nearest planetary neighbor, ready for a passing satellite to find it.
And when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter handed over final month, carrying aboard essentially the most highly effective digicam ever to enterprise into the Photo voltaic System, that is precisely what occurred.
Scientists working the HiRISE (Excessive Decision Imaging Science Experiment), which has been circling Mars since 2006, crunched the info that made it again to Earth, and have now printed an image of the face.
“There is a hill with a V-shaped collapse construction (the nostril), two craters (the eyes), and a round fracture sample (the pinnacle),” mentioned scientists on the College of Arizona, which operates the package.
Every one of many options within the 2,000-meter (1.25-mile)-wide face has a attainable rationalization that hints at simply how lively the floor of the planet is.
“The round fracture sample is perhaps as a result of settling of a deposit over a buried influence crater,” the scientists mentioned.
“Possibly the nostril is a volcanic or mud vent and the deposit might be lava or mud flows?”
HiRISE, considered one of six devices aboard the Orbiter, snaps super-detailed photos of the Pink Planet serving to to map the floor for attainable future missions, both by people or robots.
During the last ten years the workforce has managed to seize photos of avalanches as they occurred, and found darkish flows that might be some form of liquid.
They’ve additionally discovered dust devils twirling throughout the Martian floor, in addition to a characteristic that some individuals thought seemed rather a lot like Star Trek’s Starfleet emblem.
One factor they haven’t discovered, nonetheless, is the little inexperienced males who have been as soon as popularly believed to inhabit the planet.
© 2023 AFP
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Is there life on Mars? Possibly, and it may have dropped its teddy (2023, January 31)
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