NASA has had the rover “Opportunity” on the surface of Mars for a long time now. Every now and then it takes these fantastic streaming photos of the mars lanscape. Warning, do not stare into the photo, you will get sucked in and lost! This photo that the ‘Opportunity‘ took is facing eastward across the Endeavour Crater that spans 14 miles (22 kilometres) in diameter.
The photo is funny because it seems to depict the little character form the Pixar film Wall-E. It does look as though NASA is starting to learn that if it immediately comes out and refutes things or puts out a statement about weird things, people shut up and no conspiracies start. Here is the sattement released by NASA:
“The rover used the panoramic camera (Pancam) between about 4.30 and 5.00PM. local Mars time to record images taken through different filters and combined into this mosaic view. Most of the component images were recorded during the 2,888th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity’s work on Mars (9 March, 2012). At that time, Opportunity was spending low-solar-energy weeks of the Martian winter at the Greeley Haven outcrop on the Cape York segment of Endeavour’s western rim. In order to give the mosaic a rectangular aspect, some small parts of the edges of the mosaic and sky were filled in with parts of an image acquired earlier as part of a 360-degree panorama from the same location.”
So no crazy fake cartoon robots found on Mars today! Maybe tomorrow NASA can refute the existence of unicorns on Mars.