Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Finds Space Rock That Looks Like a Teddy Bear

(Image: ISRO/ISSDC/Justin Cowart/Wikimedia Commons) NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been faithfully capturing the Red Planet’s surface and atmosphere for nearly 17 years. Normally the data MRO sends to scientists on Earth is relatively mundane, relating to things like variations in ozone or climate. But MRO recently captured something that’ll make just about anyone smile: a piece of Mars’ surface that looks like a teddy bear.

On Dec. 12, 2022, MRO snapped a photo of Mars’ surface from a height of about 156 miles (251 kilometers). The resulting image depicts what looks like a teddy bear’s face, complete with two eyes, a snout, a dark nose, and a smiling mouth; all that’s missing are two round ears. The University of Arizona, which helped build MRO’s camera, shared the photo Wednesday on its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) blog.

“There’s a hill with a V-shaped collapse structure (the nose), two craters (the eyes), and a circular fracture pattern (the head),” the post reads. “The circular fracture pattern might be due to the settling of a deposit over a buried impact crater. Maybe the nose is a volcanic or mud vent and the deposit could be lava or mud flows?”

This isn’t the first time humans have found humorous or downright uncanny imagery in space. Scientists and casual internet users have been seeing faces and objects on planetary and lunar surfaces for years (though some findings are admittedly more of a stretch than others). HiRISE found a Muppet on Mars back in 2018; two years later, the European Space Agency spotted an angel and a heart on the same planet. China’s lunar rover located what many thought to be a mysterious moon cube or hut in late 2021, but around the start of the new year, Chang’e 4 confirmed the object was just a rock.

Mars’ teddy bear may also just be mud and rock, but it symbolizes the charming human tendency to find familiar shapes in just about anything. This phenomenon is called pareidolia, and it’s what allows humans to see animals in the clouds, faces in stucco, or Harambe the gorilla (remember him?) in Cheetos. With MRO’s help, we’ll hopefully find a number of recognizable figures on Mars’ surface in the future.

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