NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has captured an image of what looks like a teddy bear on the planet’s surface.
The MRO is designed to search for the existence of water and other key ingredients of life on the Red Planet, but recently, it snapped a picture of something more light-hearted.
The University of Arizona, which operates the HiRISE camera on the MRO, released a striking image appearing to show the outline of a face, two eyes, and the clear shape of a mouth. Together the features resemble a teddy bear, according to CBS News.
There have been plenty of images of the Mars surface that look a bit like things we might find on Earth, and even some weirder stuff too.
There is nothing sinister about this particular “face” on Mars. It was formed by a series of structural changes that coincidentally came together to form the shape seen in the picture, said the University of Arizona according to CBS News.
When you have endless geological formations forming all over the Martian surface, some of them are bound to look like interesting shapes. In this image of a ‘teddy bear,’ the outline of the face was caused by the “settling of a deposit over a buried impact crater,” the University of Arizona stated.
The nose and mouth of the “bear” were likely caused by a structural collapse or perhaps a volcanic vent with lava or mud flows.
The crater surrounding the formation is roughly 2,000 meters across, roughly 1.25 miles.
In 2019, the MRO captured an image of a Martian surface created by similar geological phenomena that seemed to show the “Star Trek” Starfleet logo, per CBS News.