NASA’s Perseverance rover touched down on the surface of the Red Planet on February 18, 2021, and since then, it has been documenting its exploration while simultaneously looking for any evidence of past microbial life.
2Mars avocado
VIEW GALLERY – 2 IMAGES
Throughout the time Perseverance has spent on the surface of Mars, it has run into some pretty interesting objects, most of them are rocks in unique shapes and sizes. According to NASA’s official website, which publishes all of Perseverance’s photographs, the Mars rover stumbled across an avocado-shaped rock on September 8.
The image was snapped using Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z and shows a rock that resembles an avocado cut in half. One half of the avocado laying in the foreground of the image, with the second half laying upright with a nut still in the center.
Of course, this isn’t actually a Martian avocado, and is just a rock that has seemingly been split. We can attribute this connection between the Mars rock and avocado to the phenomenon called pareidolia, which is the tendency to impose meaningful interpretation onto objects. An example of this would be looking up at the clouds and pointing out the appearances of animals, human faces, or objects. The same goes for the Mars rock that looks like an avocado.
It was only last week when NASA released some images that showed Perseverance photographed a “shark fin” and a “crab claw“. To check out those images, visit the below link.