[ad_1]
The "Martian spiders" have been discovered near the south pole of the planet, and thousands of them are visible in a single snapshot.
NASA took the incredible picture on July 26th of this year with the experience of the science of high resolution orbital imaging (HiRSE).
But the spiders themselves have only been found by a team of scientific citizens from the Planet Four initiative to analyze the HiRISE database.
Alfred McEwan, from the University of Arizona, said, "As part of the Planet Four citizen science effort, volunteers have been looking for images of the contextual camera on Mars with" spiders "or radial hollows from which fans emerge in the spring.
"We have planned this HiRISE image on such a site, to verify that it is spiders.
"There are thousands in the picture."
But these strange Mars spiders are not really exotic arachnids – nor do they have any association with the late David Bowie and his stage character Ziggy Stardust.
Instead, Martian spiders are a very unusual geographical formation known as araneiform terrain.
The areaniform terrain is the end result of the frozen sub-surface that sublimates from the ice to the warmer Martian spring.
The process of sublimation around the south pole of the planet forces the gas to penetrate the surface.
The erupting gas then throws dust trails, leaving behind dark spots and slender legs reminiscent of fuzzy spiders, known as fans and stains.
"The gas is released into the atmosphere and darker dusts can settle around the vent or carried by the winds to produce streaks.
READ MORE: US UFO Observations MAPPED: Where are you most likely to see alien vessels in the United States?
"The loss of sublimed carbon dioxide leaves behind these spider-shaped features etched into the surface."
The Planet Four project encourages people to join the ranks of NASA's top scientists to map the surface conditions of Mars.
The Planet Four website reads: "There are far too many images for a group of scientists to come out alone and computers are not enough to detect the features that we try to score.
"The human mind is far superior to analyzing images with the complexity of the Martian surface."
READ MORE: The extraterrestrial life of NASA SHOCK: The space agency admits that aliens could be hidden from view
Source link
