“All war is deception”, said the ancient Chinese tactician, Sun Tzu. And so perhaps
it’s unsurprising that the planet Mars, titled after the god of war, is quite the deceiver.
Optical illusions and trickery have been part of Mars’ story since the 1800’s, when astronomer
Giovanni Schiaparelli first looked through his telescope and saw “canals” criss-crossing
the planet’s surface, hinting at advanced alien life. The only problem? No such canals existed.
They were phantasms, an apparition. Sometimes trusting your own eyes is a dangerous thing. The
Perseverance Rover in our own time has its work cut out for it. It’s a successor of Schiaparelli,
continuing the hunt for signs of life on Mars, except this time it travels across the surface
of the planet itself. And certainly, it succeeded. It has photographed images of advanced technology
on Mars. But the red planet has a long history of deceiving us, and not everything is what it
appears to be. What is the trick, and what is the reality? I’m Alex McColgan, and you’re watching
Astrum. Join with me today as we look at some of the strange objects Perseverance has imaged
on the Red Planet that caused us to make sure our eyes weren’t playing tricks on us, in the sixth
video in this series on this incredible rover, covering May 2022 to September of that same year.
Perseverance had entered an exciting time in its journey in May. Its mission had finally taken it
to the Jezero crater delta – the location scientists were the most optimistic about
finding signs of ancient alien microbial life, hopefully buried in layers of ancient silt and
clay from a massive dried-out river. A discovery of even rudimentary life in such a place would be
mind-blowing. It would completely revolutionise our understanding of our place in the universe,
and would vastly increase the probability that we are not alone. Discovering organisms
that were more advanced than bacteria would be orders of magnitude more earth-shaking.
Particularly if we found something intelligent, as Schiaparelli had once thought he’d discovered.
And so, Perseverance attempted to collect cores and photograph abrasions from locations such as
Enchanted Lake, Three Forks, and Hawksbill gap. It didn’t have an easy time of it,
initially. Many of the rocks it encountered, such as the ones in the Devil’s Tanyard area, proved to
be extremely crumbly, and broke under the force of the Perseverance’s abrasion drill, or had surfaces
that were too rough to even begin the attempt. It wasn’t until July that Perseverance was able to
successfully take its first core sample from the Delta, from a rock named Skinner Ridge.
But in the next few months, as it travelled from location to location, it began to image
things from a distance that looked decidedly out of place. Namely, in September, it spotted a cat.
This was not a real cat, of course, but simply a somewhat cat-shaped rock formation. In my opinion,
it’s quite the rough comparison, but many people were amused by this feline fake-out loafing in the
Martian sun, with the image making the rounds on different media outlets at the time. I was
more impressed at the image of a snake head that Perseverance captured earlier in June.
You can almost see the creature’s eye here, as it tastes the thin Martian atmosphere,
perhaps looking for a treat to eat. Like a snake on the hunt, or perhaps a lurking moray eel.
Such illusions are easy enough to recognise as illusions. I don’t think anyone truly believes
that there are cats or snakes lurking in Mars’ arid deserts. But moments like this have an
important connection to another rock formation scientists found on Mars back in 1976, where the
line between illusion and groundbreaking discovery became a lot more blurred. It’s one thing to find
a rocky outcropping that looks sort of like a cat. It’s another thing when your orbiter takes a photo
of a 2km long image that perfectly looks like a human face, right there on the Martian surface.
What do you think when you see this image? Maybe this is something someone made on photoshop.
But the crazy thing is, this image is absolutely real, and was taken by the Viking 1 orbiter
nearly 5 decades ago. It was released to the public by NASA, and naturally set theorists
ablaze with speculation as to its origins. Could something that seemed to mirror our
own features so perfectly really be a naturally forming coincidence? If not, who had built it?
A long-lost civilisation that perished on Mars many millennia ago? An alien race
that later travelled to Earth, and became our ancestors? Theories abounded. So much so, that
NASA scientists later felt it important to go back to the area and image the location a second time.
They did so in 1998, and again in 2001, with the Mars Global Surveyor.
We now have HiRISE images of the location. Thanks to the much better cameras available on these
newer orbiters, the true dimensions of the “face on Mars” could be mapped out much more clearly.
What was revealed was less distinctive than the original shadowed image.
While it’s still technically possible that the face on Mars was once much more distinctive,
but has simply had its features smoothed down by weathering, it seems more likely that we can
chalk this one up to a human tendency known as pareidolia. Pareidolia is the habit we have of
seeing recognisable images in actually quite random visual patterns. For instance, have you
ever looked at a cloud and spotted something that looked recognisable? A person, or an animal, or
a car? Pareidolia has been with us since ancient times. It is thought to be an evolutionary trait:
if there’s some lurking predator hiding in the undergrowth, being able to identify it
as such with only a few visual cues is extremely useful. The downside of this is that sometimes we
see meaning where there honestly is none. A man out of the corner of our eye, but there’s no-one
there when we turn. A message in our cereal bowl. A face on Mars. Our minds are never unbiased,
and are constantly interpreting the visual stimuli we take in, trying to piece the world together in
a way that makes sense. This can be a great aid to us, helping us identify important patterns in
data. However, we have to be very careful with it, as it can also be a hinderance if it ever leads
us to jump to conclusions that later turn out to be untrue. Sadly, when it comes to Mars, not all
illusions are based on untruth. Perseverance’s next discovery is 100% factually accurate.
Back in April 2022, Perseverance started imaging strangely bright-coloured objects in the delta’s
distant terrain as it passed by. These objects were something of an enigma; scientists weren’t
sure what they were, only that they were perhaps roughly 15 cm in size. They named the bright
material “Bright Material”, and called it a day. Hopefully Perseverance would be able to get a
closer look later. Later arrived in June, when Perseverance finally imaged something. It was
definitely not a rock formation. It was silvery in colour, very thin, with a routine pattern across
its surface. It was clearly artificial in nature. And it wasn’t alone. Within the next few months,
Perseverance also imaged a tangled ball of string, and even some netting. Half a dozen such pieces
were recorded in the area. Were these the creation of a race of technologically advanced entities,
thousands of years old? Yes. But sadly, just not an alien one. They were from us.
Scientists were quickly able to identify all of these objects as being either part of the Entry,
Descent and Landing system or the Skycrane that had lowered Perseverance onto the planet all the
way back in February 2021. The silver material was a thermal blanket and had been part of the
spacecraft that had brought Perseverance down through the atmosphere of Mars. The string and
netting were likely Dacron netting, which was also part of the spacecraft and Skycrane’s insulation.
Both sets of material had clearly been torn apart by strong forces.
There is a curious facet to this, however. It was a little surprising to find these materials here.
Perseverance’s landing was roughly 2 ½ km to the southeast of this location.
The Skycrane had presumably landed somewhere nearby.
And while the parachute and parts of the spaceship had come away earlier, and so had landed at a
more distant site, these had also already been found. Ingenuity had taken photos of the downed
parachute and parts of the spacecraft roughly 1km North-west of the landing site. That still
left approximately 1 ½ km of additional distance the material had had to travel.
In the end, the solution to this question was simple. The wind was to blame. Over the year and a
half that Perseverance had been travelling around the planet, taking samples and abrading rocks,
the shifting Martian wind had taken debris from the crash site of Perseverance’s spacecraft and
had slowly but surely been migrating it across the planet. It is a testament to the relentless
nature of Mars’ winds – and the fact that there is no one on Mars doing litter collection.
This discovery was a splash of cold reality on Perseverance’s mission. While this mystery
was solved, it suddenly meant that there was a chance, however small, that cross contamination
was going to be an issue going forward. If debris was travelling across the planet in the direction
Perseverance was heading in, then there was a chance that if that debris carried a small,
hardy bacteria that had somehow survived the trip from Earth, it might throw off the results.
Fortunately, such a chance was reassuringly small. Not only did NASA work hard to keep
Perseverance free from contamination during construction, making use of clean rooms to
keep bacteria and dust out, even if something from Earth did find its way into a sample tube,
scientists would likely be able to recognise it as such. Still, scientists would be careful
going forward of contamination, or of getting debris stuck in the rover’s parts.
Perseverance’s mission goes on. In its efforts to uncover the truth, it will have to uncover
the tiniest of details. However, what I’ve come to realise is that one of the biggest hurdles it
must overcome is us. It is almost impossible to completely remove bias from ourselves,
and yet biases can cause us to interpret data in such a way as to allow ourselves to be fooled by
tricks and illusions. Although NASA was quick to recognise the artificial materials as their own,
it would have been easy for someone with less rigor to try to connect
such a discovery to signs of alien technology. After all, the temptation is surely there. The
person who proved alien life existed would forever go down in the history books. But
without taking time to double-check that what we want to see isn’t clouding what we are seeing,
we might go down in the history books for a very different reason. Nobody wants to be famous for
being the person who saw aliens when they were only rocks and debris in a crater, after all.