(ORDO NEWS) — Now that NASA‘s Martian rover has successfully landed, and the space news is full of stunning images, we’re expecting more footage from the planet’s surface over the next few months and years.
The six-legged, more than $2 billion nuclear-powered robot has already sent back many images of Gale Crater, where it has landed and will soon be heading towards a nearby nearly 5-kilometer-high mountain.
The scientific community – and with it the whole world – are waiting with bated breath for the Curiosity finds, which the rover must make in 2 months of daily digging, taking samples from the Martian surface and conducting analyzes.
Many will also be waiting for evidence of the presence of life on Mars, and Curiosity may present them – even if they actually do not exist.
NASA footage has long been the stuff of fantasies for UFO fans and conspiracy theorists, who relentlessly pored over countless photos and footage looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life (or evidence that NASA knows about the presence of aliens but carefully hides it).
Indeed, there have already been statements about the discovery of the presence of life forms on Mars.
A man named Richard Hoagland claimed that there was a human face in the 1976 photographs of the Martian region of Cydonia. The so-called “Face on Mars” sparked an international outcry when Hoagland speculatively sparked interest in the bizarre find: “Are aliens sending us a signal?
Where are those who erected this magnificent monument? On April 5, 1998, the Mars Global Surveyor took higher resolution photographs of the region than was possible in 1976.
The new images showed a heavily eroded area, and made it possible to verify that the “face” was nothing more than a figment of the imagination of people viewing the pictures are not very high quality, and it appeared because our brain has a tendency to guess human shapes and faces in the play of light and shadows.
In 2001, an amateur astronomer discovered what he thought was a mysterious rectangular structure on the surface of Mars while browsing satellite images of the planet on Google Maps.
Professional astronomers explained that it was in fact an artificial object created by the interference of cosmic rays; and the unusual shape of the object was given by the camera with which the picture was taken, and the surface of Mars had nothing to do with it at all.
History and human psychology tell us that sooner or later one of the thousands of images that Curiosity will transmit to our planet will have some kind of defect, fuzzy outlines or a play of light, which will be perceived by someone as proof of the presence of Martians.
It is possible – and no one excludes this – that the rover will indeed meet life on the Red Planet, but only it is unlikely that it will be able to stumble upon the smoking chimneys of a Martian plastic bottle recycling plant.
—
Online:
Contact us: [email protected]
Our Standards, Terms of Use: Standard Terms And Conditions.