By Tim Binnall
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) recently photographed an area of the Red Planet's surface which oddly resembles the face of a teddy bear. Beating armchair anomaly hunters to the proverbial punch, the wondrous sight actually came to light earlier this week when it was showcased online by Arizona State University's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE). Indicating that the rather remarkable picture was taken last month as the MRO was approximately 156 miles above the Red Planet, the researchers jokingly wondered if the orbiter had spotted a bear on Mars before offering their analysis of the image.
According to the HiRISE team, formation that resembles the nose of the 'bear' appears to be a "hill with a V-shaped collapse structure," while its eyes are simply small craters and they speculate that the "circular fracture pattern" which constitutes the head could be "due to the settling of a deposit over a buried impact crater." Offering a secondary theory for how the odd 'visage' may hae formed, they posit that perhaps "the nose is a volcanic or mud vent and the deposit could be lava or mud flows." The 'teddy bear' is not the first time that the HiRISE project has noticed an unusual 'face' on Mars as, back in August of 2018, they famously spotted the Muppet character Beaker staring back at them from the surface of the planet.