Bizarre ‘helmet’ on Mars looks like the Harry Potter ‘sorting hat’,
With its pointed peak and wide brim, it looks like nothing discovered on Mars before.
In fact, this Martian rock, newly spotted by NASA’s Perseverance rover, is leaving people baffled with its hat-like appearance.
The bizarre feature, snapped on Mars’ ancient Jezero Crater, is being likened to the ‘sorting hat’ from Harry Potter.
On Reddit, it’s also being compared with a helmet, a volcano, a codpiece and Marvin the Martian.
One commentator joked: ‘It’s quite obviously the helmet of a Spanish conquistador.’
While another added: ‘Looks like part of a cup holder.’
The curious feature is covered in little rocky blobs, which may reveal secrets about its formation – potentially billions of years ago.
Mars was once dotted with thousands of huge volcanoes which saw ‘super eruptions’, according to NASA – the most powerful type of volcanic blast there is.
While it may be reminiscent of the sorting hat, this effect may be due to a psychological phenomenon known as ‘pareidolia’ – perceiving likenesses on random images.
As one Reddit user pointed out, the human mind is ‘great at seeing patterns’ which it recognizes from objects and phenomena down here on Earth.
‘This rock pattern looks like a helmet when viewed from this very specific angle,’ they said, adding: ‘From any other angle it’s going to look like any old rock.’
The rock was snapped on August 5 by Perseverance using its Mastcam-Z instrument, the NASA rover’s primary science camera.
It was found at the Jezero Crater, a 28-mile impact basin on Mars that held liquid water billions of years ago.
A closer look reveals it is covered from top to bottom with small bobbles, which are known by geologists as ‘spherules’.
Spherules, already found on the Red Planet, are roughly spherical pebbles, ranging 0.01mm to 4mm in diameter (up to 0.15 inches).
On Earth, spherules are formed by rapid cooling of molten rock droplets during a volcanic eruption, or by the condensation of rock vaporized by a meteorite impact.
But why the whole object has formed such an unusual hat-like shape is leaving people scratching their heads.
This isn’t the first time strange spheres have been spotted on Mars, which is an average of 140 million miles (225 million km) away from Earth.
Earlier this year, A close-up image captured by Perseverance showed an alien-like mass comprised of hundreds of the millimeter-sized spheres.
Dr Matthew Chojnacki, a planetary geologist at the Planetary Science Institute, said they could be ‘frothy lava’ that rapidly cooled might lead to such a deposit.
Dr Joel Davis, planetary geologist at Imperial College London, said they may have been formed by water circulating through the Martian ground billions of years ago.
‘[This was] potentially when conditions were too cold for liquid water to exist on the surface,’ Dr Davis told the Daily Mail.
Perseverance touched down on Mars’ Jezero Crater – believed to be the home of a lush lakebed and river delta billions of years ago – in February 2021 after a nearly seven-month journey through space.
It is tasked with seeking traces of fossilised microbial life from Mars’ ancient past and to collect rock specimens for return to Earth through future missions to the Red Planet.
