A photo from Mars has people seeing a teddy bear staring back.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the hill on 12 December 2022 while flying 251 kilometres above Mars’s southern highlands. The image came from the orbiter’s HiRISE camera, which has captured tens of thousands of images of the Martian surface since 2006.
In this one, two dark, round pits look like eyes. A pale ridge between them tapers down like a snout, and a near-perfect circular crack outlines what looks like a head.
But the explanation is much less cute.
“There’s a hill with a V-shaped collapse structure (the nose), two craters (the eyes), and a circular fracture pattern (the head),” Alfred McEwen, the University of Arizona planetary scientist who leads the HiRISE camera team, explained in 2023.
McEwen suspects the circular fracture could be left behind after loose material settled on top of a buried impact crater that had long since filled in. He said the “nose” might be a volcanic or mud vent, and the surrounding V-shape may mark where lava or mud once flowed out.
The reason people see a bear is pareidolia, the tendency for the brain to spot familiar patterns, especially faces, in random shapes. It is the same effect that can make car headlights look like a face or a water stain look like a religious figure.
It is also not the first time Mars has seemed to look back.
In 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter photographed a mesa in Mars’s Cydonia region that looked like a carved human face at low resolution. Later, higher-resolution images from orbiters including HiRISE showed it was a mesa, a rock formation lit in a particular way.
Another face-like feature turned up in August 2024, when scientists working with the European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter were cataloguing chloride salt deposits in Terra Sirenum. They found one shaped like a smiley face, a ring of dried salt with two small craters where eyes would be.
The salt deposits matter because they were left behind after shallow ponds or lakes evaporated during Mars’s wetter past, concentrating and crystallising dissolved minerals. The article says salty water can stay liquid at temperatures down to around minus 40 degrees Celsius, making those deposits targets for future missions looking for biosignatures.
The piece also notes other Mars lookalikes seen more recently, including a jellyfish, weird pits, a human bone and mushrooms. It says the jellyfish was actually a cosmic ray striking a camera sensor, and that scientists still are not sure what carved the pits.
“Even if it doesn’t have any bears on it.”
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