NASA rover spots the “Star Trek” symbol on Mars

Live long, prosper.

Roof your boat

While going about its usual planetary roving and photography missions, the Curiosity Mars rover spotted something delightful — a rock that appears to form the Starfleet logo in the shape of a delta from “Star Trek.”

like Space.com website Reportsthe familiar code was published as part of a cache of initial Curiosity images taken on January 9, and as published by the California Institute of Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mentioned in the image data descriptionIt was captured by the rover's left navigation camera.

The next day, Stuart Atkinson, an amateur Mars observer and self-described “astro-poet,” referenced the miss-you-miss incident in a tweet, joking that the Curiosity team might have done it.Smile like a Cheshire cat“When noticing the strange-shaped rock that was photographed on the surface of the red planet.

Like NASA He explained on the blog Curiositythe images were taken while the rover was performing “contact science on a flat block of dark-colored rock in its workspace,” which can be clearly seen even in black-and-white images where light rock formations of Martian sand stand out.

Red shirts

This certainly isn't the first time strange Martian rocks have made headlines.

Last summer, NASA's Perseverance rover, sent in 2020 as a kind of follow-up escort to Curiosity on the more straightforward mission of searching for signs of life, spotted a strange doughnut-shaped rock whose pockmarked appearance scientists have struggled to detect. He explains.

Experts on the rocks were so divided that no one could even agree on whether they came from the planet itself or had fallen from space.

“I can't say with 100 percent certainty that it's not a meteorite, but I think that's highly unlikely,” said Jim Rice, a space researcher at Arizona State University. Tell CNN Last July. “The reason I say that is because this area we're in, we see a lot of rocks that have these kind of hollow interiors.”

In comparison, the “Starfleet” rock recently spotted by Curiosity is a completely natural rock – although that doesn't make it any less beautiful.

More about Mars: NASA publishes a photo of epic lines carved on the surface of Mars