UFO hunters are excited after spotting a ‘mushroom’ on the dusty surface of Mars.
The image was taken by Nasa’s Curiosity rover in 2013, but the freak ‘fungi’ on the surface of the Red Planet remained unnoticed… until now.
Scott Waring shared a photo of the ‘mushroom’ on his website, which regularly finds things such as a secret door or a baby bear on Mars, earlier this week, saying: ‘I’m not sure how or why NASA could overlook such a thing.’
He claimed: ‘The top is round, uneven and wrinkled… same as the ones in my front yard. This one has clearly pushed up out of the Mars dirt.
‘Did you know that mushroom spores can live in the harsh environment of space and may have travelled to Mars this way?’
But while it’s true that mushroom spores are hardy, and have even survived over a year in outer space conditions on the International Space Station, this particular rock is not an alien species of portobello.
Astrobiologist Dr Louisa Preston, head of planetary science at UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, told Metro: ‘Given the environmental extremes on the surface of Mars such as high sterilising radiation, low atmospheric pressure and below freezing temperatures, this is not a mushroom.
‘These conditions are too extreme for the most hardiest life forms we have found on the Earth to survive, let alone mushrooms.
‘If life does exist on Mars, it is more likely to be found below ground, where it would be shielded from the harsh environment at the surface.
‘The image is simply a mixture of cool-looking rocks, quite possibly rounded concretions or eroded pebbles, and a great camera angle, that has captured a bigger rock sitting on or simply located above a smaller rock.’
She added that while we can learn a lot about Mars from sending rovers out there, it is still very tricky to take and transmit images of another planet.
‘The surrounding geological context, shadows, angle of the rover in relation to the rocks, and where the Sun is, all affect the types of images we get and importantly how we interpret them,’ she said.
‘In this case it is clever camera work and some interesting rocks lying next to each other, not mushrooms.’
If you’re disappointed that the ‘mushroom’ is not a mushroom, take heart that there’s still hope to find other life on Mars.
Biomarkers are more likely to have been conserved beneath the surface, where they haven’t been blasted with space radiation.
The Rosalind Franklin rover will head to Mars in 2028, designed to drill up to two metres beneath the planet’s surface hunting for evidence of past — or maybe even present — life.
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