EUROPE: “There is no spoon,” NASA wrote on its Curiosity Mars Rover page on Facebook. The odd statement had nothing to do with a kitchenware crisis at the NASA office, but referred instead to an image snapped Sunday by the Mars probe. What resembles a floating spoon on the planet’s surface “is likely a ventifact—a rock shaped by wind,” NASA wrote.
Ventifacts form on Mars as they do on Earth, when rocks are worn away by windblown particles, almost always sand. On Earth, they can be found in places like the Little Cowhole Mountains and Silver Lake of the Mojave Desert in California. Rocks that are likely ventifacts have been found on Mars by the Viking and Pathfinder landers before Curiosity.
This is hardly the first time a rock has had an uncanny resemblance to a familiar object or species on the Red Planet, where people seem to enjoy picking out shapes as much as children like pointing out bunnies and dinosaurs in the clouds. In the past, a “rat,” “woman,” “jelly doughnut” and “crab” have been spotted in NASA photos. But these have all just been rocks, just like the spoon-shaped object in this recent photo.
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