While examining the surface of Mars, astronomers discovered the friendly face of what appeared to be a smiling bear looking at them. While it wasn’t actually the animal, the formation of the rocks on the surface bear an uncanny resemblance to the creature.
The image showing what appeared to be the face of a Martian teddy bear was shared by scientists with the University of Arizona last week. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is responsible for capturing the rock formation with two eyes, a nose, and a grinning mouth.
The university shared that the MRO captured the photo on DEc. 12, 2022, while cruising above the planet at an altitude of 156 miles.
A statement from the University of Arizona’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment shared that the face on the planet is most likely a hill that has been broken apart in the center of a crater.
“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 said. “The circular fracture pattern might be due to the settling of a deposit over a buried impact crater.”
This isn’t the first time that NASA’s MRO has found rocks resembling something else on the surface of Mars. In 2018 an image of another Martian rock formation was mistaken for the Muppet Beaker.
The science blog LiveScience calls the phenomenon pareidolia, a psychological tendency where people find significance in random images or sounds. In this case the images are rocks on a planet that’s more than 127 million miles away.
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