NASA Perseverance Mars rover spots delightfully goofy rocks (is that a butt?)
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Behold the funniest Mars rocks the rover has found so far.
NASA's Perseverance rover is on Mars to undertake serious science, but that doesn't mean we can't have fun with some of the weirder rocks the wheeled explorer has spotted since landing in February.
There's a long history with Mars and pareidolia -- the human tendency to see familiar objects in random shapes. I once spent hours looking for "faces" in images from NASA's Curiosity rover, just for fun. Space fans have imaginatively seen rocks and formations that resemble a bone, a fish, blueberries and even a spoon.
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With a few flights of fancy and a willingness to be silly, you can find all sorts of entertaining shapes littered across the floor of the Jezero Crater. Here are some of the best so far.
'Brachiosaurus'
Software engineer Kevin Gill, a "data wrangler at NASA-JPL," has a long track record of processing Mars images for the enjoyment of space fans. He spotted an elegant rock snapped by the rover on April 15.
"Awww, it looks like NASA Perseverance found a tiny fossilized brachiosaurus on Mars," Gill tweeted.
The small stone featured a long "neck," a tiny "head" and a big body that made it look like the famously large vegetation-munching dinosaur. To me, this unusual rock resembles No-Face from the Studio Ghibli movie Spirited Away.
'Butt rock'
Space writer Jason Major noticed a rump-shaped rock in the distance in a rover image from February. "Perseverance probably won't bother going to study it but I hope somebody files this one as 'butt rock,'" Major tweeted cheekily.
Perseverance got a clearer look at "butt rock" a couple months later. And it still looks a bit like a behind.
Much like we've seen all sorts of heart-shaped objects in places out in space, perhaps derriere-shaped stones will become hot targets for Perseverance's cameras.
'Odd' rock
The first widely famous rock from the mission dates to late March when the rover eyed a 6-inch-long pockmarked object that NASA described as "odd." Researchers speculated it might be a meteorite or a weathered chunk of bedrock.
With preceding NASA rovers as a model, we can look forward to more photos of entertaining, intriguing and downright funny Martian rocks as Perseverance makes its way through the crater.
With other rovers having already spotted a spoon, a pancake, fruit and a "jelly doughnut," we could use a few more food items and table settings to make a complete pareidolia meal.
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