Curiosity has been rolling around on Mars since 2012, and apart from a few bumps along the way, is still sending back incredible images of the Red Planet.
There’s nothing better than a tantalising conspiracy theory to make your day that more awesome as you search photographs of Mars for alien life.
Specifically, the weird rock appeared near the Mars Rover ‘Opportunity’, which has been exploring the red planet since 2004.
It has almost been a year since NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover touched down on the red planet. The WALL-E lookalike landed on Mars on 6 August last year, and since then has been drilling into the martian planet, collecting soil samples and taking some of the best selfies in the universe.
Unless you’re currently in some kind of deep space training program, or you have some diabolical plan that no one knows about, the chances are pretty slim that you’ll ever actually get to set foot on Mars. Thankfully, we’ve got the next best thing for you, a fully interactive 360° panorama from the surface of the Red Planet. Enjoy.
In my opinion this is a far more exciting countdown than the Olympics; in 40 days, NASA’s nuclear powered Curiosity rover will enter the Martian atmosphere, and the landing is the most nerve-racking part for the engineers.
Ending a seven-year mission, NASA has decided to cut off communications with the Mars rover Spirit. Data was last received from Spirit in March 2010, and it hasn’t been heard from since – the thinking is that the rover was damaged during the martian winter when there wasn’t enough solar power for its survival heaters to run.