'Mars Rat' Taking Internet by Storm

[Buster's Uncle]

'Mars Rat' Taking Internet by Storm
By Mike Wall | SPACE.com – 19 hrs ago..

Once seen, it cannot be unseen. The “Mars rat” captured by Curiosity’s lens.

 
A Mars rock that bears a passing resemblance to a rodent is scuttling across the Internet with gusto, even inspiring some fans to set up a Twitter account in its name.

UFO buffs spotted the purported "Mars rat" in a panoramic photo snapped in September 2012 by NASA's Curiosity rover. Zooming in on a portion of the image reveals what appears to be a rodent crouching between two rocks, its nose to the ground.

"It's a cute rodent on Mars. Note its lighter-color upper and lower eyelids, its nose and cheek areas, its ear, its front leg and stomach," Scott Waring wrote at UFO Sightings Daily back in December. "Looks similar to a squirrel camouflaged in the stones and sand by its colors."

In an update to that post, Waring raised the possibility that NASA flew the rat/squirrel to Mars secretly, as part of an experiment testing out the Red Planet's ability to support life as we know it.

"Why would they not tell us about it?" Waring wrote. "Because the squirrel would be expected to die eventually and that would get PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] to fight against them in a court of law."

The Mars rat has now gone viral, jumping from the pages of UFO Sightings Daily to more mainstream publications such as Discovery News, Fox News and a host of other outlets (including, of course, SPACE.com).

The rodent has even picked up its own Twitter account, @RealMarsRat. Just 49 people were following the rat as of Friday afternoon (May 31), but that's still pretty good for a rodent.

While some people seem to really believe that a squirrel is crawling around on the Red Planet (or was in September, anyway), the Mars rodent is actually an example of a psychological phenomenon called pareidolia.

Pareidolia refers to the tendency of the human brain to perceive animals or other familiar shapes in vague or random images. The phenomenon has fueled a great deal of excited speculation about the Red Planet over the years, most famously after some people saw a humanoid face on Mars in photos taken by NASA's Viking 1 orbiter in 1976.

And just this March, UFO Sightings Daily reported that an apparent animal, perhaps a rat or a lizard, lurked in another one of Curiosity's photos.

It's highly unlikely that a rat, squirrel, lizard or any other organism could survive on the cold, dry Martian surface today, researchers say, though some scientists think the Red Planet may still be able to support microbial life in select underground pockets.

Things were likely different in Mars' wetter and warmer past, however. Curiosity's observations led mission scientists to announce earlier this year that microbes could have survived on the Red Planet billions of years ago.

http://news.yahoo.com/mars-rat-taking-internet-storm-232339941.html

That's definitely a squirrel...

[Buster's Uncle]

Curiosity Rover Leaving 'Mars Rat' Behind
By Mike Wall | SPACE.com – 47 mins ago..

 
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity will apparently perform no follow-up studies of a Red Planet rock that resembles a rodent, dealing a blow to the nascent field of Martian mammalogy.

The so-called "Mars rat" has generated a lot of Internet interest lately, with some UFO buffs claiming that it may be an indigenous Red Planet lifeform or an Earth rodent Curiosity carried to Mars as part of a secret experiment.

But Curiosity scientists are pretty sure that the Mars rat — which was spotted in a zoomed-in portion of a photo taken by the rover in September 2012 — is just a rock.

"Clearly, it results from, you know, a lot of things like wind erosion and mechanical abrasion and breakdown chemical weathering of the rocks, as to why they get these weird shapes," Curiosity deputy project scientist Joy Crisp, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told reporters Wednesday (June 5).

So there doesn't seem to be a lot of motivation among mission scientists to investigate the Mars rat further. And the window to do so will last just a few more weeks, as the Curiosity rover is set to begin an epic drive that will take it far away from the petrified rodent.

The 1-ton robot is gearing up to embark for the base of Mount Sharp, a mysterious mountain that rises 3.4 miles (5.5 kilometers) into the Red Planet sky. The trek will cover about 5 miles (8 km) of straight-line distance and will likely take about a year, mission managers said.

Curiosity will begin the epic journey after it wraps up three tasks near its current location, none of which involve the Mars rat. The rover will search for differences in hydrogen abundance across two different types of bedrock, and it will investigate intriguing nearby outcrops called Point Lake and Shaler, researchers said.

Curiosity scientists tend to be amused when people see rodents, lizards and other recognizable shapes in the rocks photographed by the rover, Crisp said.

But such claims — the result of a psychological phenomenon called pareidolia, which refers to the human brain's tendency to spot familiar things in random images — are not necessarily a bad thing, she added.

"It's fun in a way, too, in that it will attract a lot of the public to look at the images and learn a little bit about Mars by pulling them in this way," Crisp said.

http://news.yahoo.com/curiosity-rover-leaving-mars-rat-behind-230721368.html

[Unorthodox]

And would it really be that bad to go take a closer pic?  I mean, what's it doing in the mean time?  :zzz:

[Buster's Uncle]

Dunno -you'd think they'd want a shot from a slightly different angle, to shut the nuts up.