First there were the "Clangers," then there were the "Biker Mice From Mars." Now, an amateur astronomer believes he may have spotted evidence of a real-life rodent race on the Red Planet, after trawling through images captured by NASA’s Curiosity rover.
According to a video on YouTube channel ArtAlienTV, a picture that appears to show a giant mouse scurrying across the surface of Mars was taken by the rover’s right-hand mast-cam at 04:46 on November 1, last year, close to the ridge of the 154-kilometer-wide (96 miles) Gale Crater. While no official announcement about the discovery of alien mice on Mars has yet been made by NASA, Joe White, who owns ArtAlienTV, says that the creature is “plain as day” and could be about “two or three feet [60 to 90 centimeters] long.”
Curiosity captured the image during its 509th Mars day, also known as a sol. Each sol is slightly longer than an Earth day, lasting for 24 hours and 37 minutes. Speaking to the Daily Mail, White admitted that the supposed mouse “could be an optical illusion but it has big ears, nose and eyes visible.”
This is far from the first time that seemingly unexplainable objects have been spotted by Curiosity. Earlier this year, for instance, a photo appearing to show pyramids on the planet’s surface caused a stir back on Earth, although experts insist that many of these sensational discoveries are in fact no more than oddly-shaped rocks which cause viewers’ imaginations to run away with them.
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