As far as landforms go, Mars is pretty drab — it’s mostly just rocks and craters. But now the Perseverance rover has discovered some particularly strange rocks that have been hollowed out into weird shapes.
On April 15, a strange donut-shaped rock caught the mechanical eye of Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z instrument from a distance of about 400 m (1,312 ft). Over the next few months, the rover kept coming closer, finally taking a sharper image on June 22 from 100 m (328 ft) away.
NASA scientists say it may have been eroded by wind blasting over eons of time from a smaller rock that once existed at the center. This can leave a void that only gets bigger with the wind over time.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
A few days later, on June 26, Perseverance took another photo of a strange rock nearby. The cheese resembles a block of Swiss cheese, with large holes leading into a hollow center.
When you look at masses of Martian rocks, naturally some of them start to look like other things.That’s why people claim to have discovered Humanoid, the door or keel On the horizon, even bewildered rocks that seem to appear and disappear. But just like clouds are always clouds, not the faces or animals they look like, so these rocks are just… rocks.
But even so, they could still reveal new insights into these alien landscapes. Or at least, they’re just cool landmarks worth seeing.
