NASA Curiosity Rover News: Mars to Embark On New Mission, No Further Investigation Into 'Mars Rat'
The Mars rover is taking its "curiosity," elsewhere and will be leaving behind that strange rock formation, nicknamed "The Mars Rat."
SPACE.com reported Thursday that the Curiosity Rover is getting ready to make a journey to the base of Mount Sharp, a 3.4 mile high mountain on the Red Planet. It will take almost a year for the robot to travel about 5 miles.
First, however, it will wrap up a few final tasks -- no one which include the so-called "Mars rat". It will attempt to locate hydrogen in areas of bed rock and observe two rock outcrops, "Shaler" and "Point Lake."
A Wednesday press release from NASA described the mission team's delight in the progress Curiosity has made so far.
"We're hitting full stride," wrote Mars Science Laboratory Project Manager Jim Erickson at NASA's Pasadena, California, Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"This truly is a mission of exploration, so just because our end goal is Mount Sharp doesn't mean we're not going to investigate interesting features along the way."
The "Mars Rat" became a phenomenon on the internet last week. It even has a Twitter account and the September 2012 photograph of the rock formation became a favorite of UFO-interested conspiracy theorists who claimed the rock formation might be a native Martian life form or part of a secret experiment.
NASA officials have dismissed the theory, using geological phenomena as an explanation for the rodent-like appearance of the rock formation.
"Clearly, it results from, you know, a lot of things like wind erosion and mechanical abrasion and breakdown chemical weathering of the rocks, as to why they get these weird shapes," Joy Crisp, the deputy project scientist for the Curiosity mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told reporters Wednesday.
Another idea that arose from the "Mars rat" was the psychological phenomenon pareidolia, where the human brain visualizes familiar items within random images.
Crisp said that Curiosity's scientists are often amused when people have claimed to identify recognizable things in the photos the rover has produced.
"It's fun in a way, too, in that it will attract a lot of the public to look at the images and learn a little bit about Mars by pulling them in this way," Crisp said.
Check out Newsy.com's 'Mars Rat' video.
