UFO enthusiasts are all beside themselves because an image was transmitted by the Mars rover, Curiosity, that showed an unexplained beam of light in the distance.
No, this isn’t another April Fool’s joke.
The image is real, but the reason is still up for debate. UFO fanatics that believe in intelligent life on other planets think it is a light from an underground facility occupied by Martians.
But before we cry extraterrestrial, the bright light may be nothing more than a “glinty rock.”
“One possibility is that the light is the glint from a rock surface reflecting the sun,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) lead for the engineering cameras on Curiosity Justin Maki told FoxNews.com.
Maki explained that the bright spots appear in single images taken by the Navigation Camera on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover’s right-eye but not its left. In the right-eye images, the spot is in different locations and is seen at the ground surface level in front of a crater rim on the horizon.
“When these images were taken each day, the sun was in the same direction as the bright spot, west-northwest from the rover, and relatively low in the sky,” said Maki. “The rover science team is also looking at the possibility that the bright spots could be sunlight reaching the camera’s CCD directly through a vent hole in the camera housing, which has happened previously on other cameras on Curiosity and other Mars rovers when the geometry of the incoming sunlight relative to the camera is precisely aligned.”
“We think it’s either a vent-hole light leak or a glinty rock.”
NASA is pretty well convinced that whatever is causing the light, it isn’t intelligent life. They have no plans to send the rover on a hunting expedition.
My opinion? Martian teenagers having a keger party.
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