A Bear Face Was Spotted On Mars. Here’s How That Happened

That’s no alien art form if you were just wondering.

Bear Face seen on Mars. NASA HiRISE/ Twitter

Social media is abuzz with a picture of a bear taken not on Earth but on our neighborly planet Mars. Before you rush to any conclusions, no alien life hasn’t been spotted on the planet, and there aren’t any bears that we know of so far. The image of the bear was taken and shared by NASA.

That a strange-looking image has come from Mars should not be surprising at all. With humans planning to foray beyond the Moon, there is a lot of surveillance of the Red Planet currently underway, and even the slightest resemblance to anything Earthy gets picked up.

For instance, last year, a small crevice barely 11 inches wide and 17 inches across made it to the internet as a ‘doorway’ to something sinister on Mars. Once again the image was shared by NASA after the Curiosity Rover shot it.

Shot by HiRISE

This time, the image is shot by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE. A little over five feet (1.6 m) long, the experiment is a powerful camera with a focal length of 40 feet (12 m) located on the Nadir side of the spacecraft so that it can continuously look at the Red Planet.

It is equipped with 14 detectors, each covered with a filter in the red, near-infrared, or blue-green wavelength bands. Hi-RISE can acquire images containing as much as 28 Gigabytes (GB) of data in as little as six seconds, its NASA webpage states.

Source:  interestingengineering.com