Beam me up, Scotty.
Throughout the years, we’ve seen some pretty crazy things on Mars. UFU hunters attribute some of the craziest things on Mars to past alien life on the red planet. Some have even proposed that there’s intelligent life on Mars today. Some of the weirdest discoveries photographed by NASA’s satellites and rovers on the ground fuel that state of mind. In the wake of a global UFO history, a new image from the surface of Mars has caused new admiration for our neighboring red planet. While exploring Mars from the skies, the team of researchers in charge of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) posted on their official Twitter account the image of a sand formation on the red planet, highlighting in a comment it appears to be eerily similar to the Starfleet logo of the Star Trek series. And who could blame them?
It’s pretty awesome, and the resemblance is uncanny. But it’s no evidence of alien life, and no, the enterprise didn’t crash on Mars. Instead, what we see in the images beamed back from the MRO is a dune formation and the fact that we find it familiar results from pareidolia.
A Star ‘Treky‘ dune
The odd formation is located southeast of the plain of Hellas Planitia and results from a complex history related to dunes, lava, and wind. As experts have explained, a very long, long time ago, there were large crescent-shaped dunes on Mars, dubbed barchan dunes. They were specifically sculpted to their particular form due to the wind on Mars. As the lava flowed on Mars, it passed around them, creating weird shapes. As the lava cooled, it hardened. But it did so around the dunes.
Martian winds continued blowing on the planet as the sand of the dunes scattered, it left behind the hardened lava. That is precisely what we see in the photograph. Some of these dunes are reminiscent of things we have here on Earth. In this case, it was Star Trek and Starfleet’s logo. The region where the odd shape was found is actually home to around 300 similar formations. And according to NASA, around 400 similar dunes were spotted by MRO in a region called Noctis Labyrinthus on Mars.
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