NASA Mars Rover Captures Mysterious New Images on the Red Planet

August 23, 2022

By by Dulce Maria Vazquez, age 14

Recent news reports highlight discoveries by a NASA Mars rover. A Mars rover is a motor vehicle designed to travel on the surface of Mars, cover more territory, and examine the planet closely. The NASA Mars rover is called Curiosity. It recently took a mysterious picture of what looks like a doorway on the red planet.

A magnified version of the image was shared by space watchers on social media. It made the rock formation look like a door and appear much larger. But NASA’s administration and Mars advisors say the curious formation is small, only about 12 inches tall and 16 inches wide. Curiosity has been exploring mountainous areas on Mars since it was launched in 2012.

Mars has a lot of surface cracks in the rocky region where this image was captured.

“There are linear fractures throughout this outcrop, and this is a location where several linear fractures happen to intersect,” said Gaia Stucky de Quay, a researcher at Harvard who studies the surface of Mars. She theorizes the cracks in this area led to a bigger piece of rock that was breaking and created the so called “doorway.” Most cracks were formed due to wind erosion, dust storms, or “Marsquakes,” as Stucky de Quay calls them.

There have been a lot of public questions regarding the timing of the image’s release, just a few days before Congress holds hearings about UFOs. So far, Congress has talked about countries like China and Russia, but not anything about aliens.

NASA has concluded that aliens did not build the doorway on Mars. But some others still hold out hope that aliens really exist.

[Sources: Associated Press; Madison.com; NASA]

About the Author:

Dulce Vazquez is a freshman at Madison West High School. She has been working at SSFP for a year now. Dulce is interested in writing about history and technology. In her free time, she enjoys spending time outdoors playing volleyball and running cross country.