NASA spies Martian rocks that look just like a teddy bear - Space.com
In an image shared Jan. 25 by The University of Arizona (UA), what appears to be the face of an enormous Martian teddy bear — complete with two beady eyes, a button nose and an upturned mouth — grins at the camera of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter(MRO).
According to UA, this photo of an uncanny assortment of geological formations was snapped on Dec. 12, 2022, as the MRO cruised roughly 156 miles (251 kilometers) above the Red Planet.It's likely just a broken-up hill in the center of an ancient crater, according to a statement posted to UA's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera blog(opens in new tab)."There's a hill with a V-shaped collapse structure (the nose), two craters (the eyes), and a circular fracture pattern (the head)," the statement reads.Viewers may see a bear's face emerge from a collection of dusty rocks and crevices thanks to a phenomenon called pareidolia(opens in new tab), a psychological tendency that leads people to find significance in random images or sounds.Both Beaker and the newly discovered Martian teddy bear were imaged by HiRISE, which is one of six science instruments on board the MRO.