{"id":622951,"date":"2026-09-13T01:34:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T01:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/622951\/"},"modified":"2026-09-13T01:34:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T01:34:11","slug":"astronomers-spotted-a-bear-on-mars-sciencealert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/622951\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers Spotted a ‘Bear’ on Mars : ScienceAlert"},"content":{"rendered":"

On 12 December 2022<\/a>, an orbiter traveling 251 kilometers (156 miles) above the southern highlands of Mars<\/a> photographed a hill. <\/p>\n

It should have been an unremarkable shot \u2013 one of tens of thousands NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE camera<\/a> has captured of the Martian surface since 2006.<\/p>\n

Instead, something seemed to be looking back.<\/p>\n

Two dark, round pits sat like eyes. <\/p>\n

Between them, a pale ridge tapered down like an adorable snout. The whole thing was ringed by a near-perfect circular crack, giving it the outline of a head. <\/p>\n

If you look at it together, it’s hard to deny that it looks \u2013 almost comically \u2013 like an adorable little bear.<\/p>\n

\"Astronomers(NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/UArizona)<\/p>\n

But, alas, there’s a more mundane explanation.<\/p>\n

“There’s a hill with a V-shaped collapse structure (the nose), two craters (the eyes), and a circular fracture pattern (the head),” Alfred McEwen, the University of Arizona planetary scientist who leads the HiRISE camera team, explained<\/a> in 2023.<\/p>\n

Even the individual features have ordinary explanations. McEwen suspects the circular fracture could be what’s left after loose material settled on top of a buried, long-since-filled impact crater.<\/p>\n

The ‘nose’ might be a volcanic or mud vent, with the surrounding V-shape marking where lava or mud once flowed out of it.<\/p>\n

So why do we see a sweet little bear looking back?<\/p>\n

This is what’s known as pareidolia<\/a> \u2013 the same wiring that turns a car’s headlights into a startled face, or a water stain into a religious icon. Human brains have evolved to spot faces quickly, in bad light, from a distance.<\/p>\n

This might be because, for most of our history, recognizing ‘that’s a face’ a half-second sooner than the next primate could have been the difference between spotting a threat and missing it.<\/p>\n

\"Subscribe<\/a><\/p>\n

The tradeoff is a pattern-recognition system so trigger-happy it finds faces everywhere \u2013 including in a grainy orbital photo of Martian rock.<\/p>\n

It’s not the first time we’ve seen something look back at us from Mars. In 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter photographed a mesa in Mars’ Cydonia region<\/a> that, at low resolution looked eerily like a carved human face staring up at space.<\/p>\n

Higher-resolution images from later orbiters, HiRISE included, quietly ended the argument: it was a mesa. A large, unremarkable rock formation that happened to catch the light a certain way. <\/p>\n

A completely different Martian smiley turned up much more recently, and for reasons that have nothing to do with its expression. <\/p>\n

In August 2024, scientists working with the European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter<\/a> were cataloging chloride salt deposits in a region called Terra Sirenum when they came across one shaped like a smiley face \u2013 a ring of dried salt with two small craters sitting where eyes would go.<\/p>\n

\"Astronomers(ESA\/TGO\/CaSSIS)<\/p>\n

The salt itself is the interesting part. It’s what’s left behind after shallow ponds or lakes evaporated, sometime during Mars’ wetter past, letting dissolved minerals concentrate and crystallize. <\/p>\n

Salty water like that can stay liquid at temperatures \u2013 down to around -40 \u00b0C \u2013 that would freeze plain water solid, which is exactly the kind of extreme, long-lasting brine where life could plausibly have hung on the longest as Mars dried out.<\/p>\n

Related: Lifeless Objects Stare at You Everywhere. A New Study Explains Why They Won’t Quit<\/a><\/p>\n

That makes deposits like this one genuine targets for future missions hunting for biosignatures, grin or no grin.<\/p>\n

More recently, we’ve also seen a jellyfish on Mars<\/a> (that one turned out to be a cosmic ray striking the camera’s sensor), weird pits<\/a>, a human bone<\/a>, and mushrooms<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Most of those have ordinary explanations by now \u2013 though as of this week, scientists still aren’t sure what carved the pits. <\/p>\n

But we’re continuously discovering cool things about the red planet itself. Even if it doesn’t have any bears on it.<\/p>\n

This article was fact-checked by Peter Dockrill<\/a> and edited by Peter Dockrill<\/a>. While we pride ourselves on our process, we are only human. If you spot a mistake, please let us know<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On 12 December 2022, an orbiter traveling 251 kilometers (156 miles) above the southern highlands of Mars photographed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":622952,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[61,60,2209,82],"class_list":["post-622951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-msft-content","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=622951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622951\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/622952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=622951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=622951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=622951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}