Folks are spotting all kinds of strange things on the surface of Mars, thanks to the Curiosity rover and a phenomenon called “pareidolia.” Pareidolia is the psychological tendency to interpret random stimuli, especially sounds or images, according to familiar patterns. It’s the reason you might see rabbits and dragons in fluffy clouds or one of the Beatles in a Rorschach blot; our minds want to create meaning in things even if there really is none.
The Curiosity was launched in November 2011 and touched down on Mars in August 2012. Since then, people have seen rats, elephants, strange ghostly women, smiling faces, and even the Rolling Stones logo in the images of Mars’ surface sent back by the rover. The latest visual, the floating spoon, was the result of the Internet playing “I Spy” with pictures Curiosity captured on August 30, 2015. A forum on the site UnmannedSpaceflight.com first started talking on Tuesday about the rock outcropping that looks like a long, thin spoon hovering above the ground; see if you can spot it for yourself here.
Artwork by Dust Storm
Images like that of the floating spoon are a testament to the Mars environment capable of shaping and maintaining such delicate formations. There is no rain on Mars, and there aren’t any earthquakes. What there is plenty of, though, is wind. The shapes on Mars’ surface are largely the product of wild dust storms driven by wind that can build and carve formations, as well as erode and destroy them. It’s hard to say whether the floating spoon is really shaped like it appears to be or whether it is just an interesting trick of the light, taking advantage of our pareidolic tendencies. But scientists do believe that it is a thin, delicate formation made possible by the uninhabited surface and the light gravity on the Red Planet–even if it isn’t really a big floating spoon.
DeepDream Digital Pareidolia
For more cool plays on pareidolia, check out the DeepDream program that is basically a computer-generated version of the psychological phenomenon. The DeepDream software uses image recognition algorithms to generate faces and pictures where they aren’t really any present, resulting in deliberately over-processed pictures that are fascinatingly trippy (even if a little unnerving).
