What Is This Thing On Mars?

A NASA image of Mars spread around the world of social media over the weekend has imaginations running wild .
We can easily see in The photo a stone formation in front of a cave. Some people say it's like a crab monster from a science fiction tale.

Here's a closer look:

But future missions to Mars are improbable to face any crab monstersdon't, So don't worry.

The Senior Astronomer and Director of the Center for SETI Research, Seth Shostak, said he gets images like this one about once a week.

"Those that send them to me are generally quite excited, as they claim that these frequently resemble SOMETHING you wouldn't expect to find on the rusty, dusty surface of the Red Planet," he said via email. "It's usually some sort of animal, but occasionally even weirder objects such as automobile parts. Maybe they think there are cars on Mars."

Seth Shostak said it's just a pareidolia,For those who don't know what is pareidolia it's really just a phenomenon : the brain's ability to make shapes out of random objects For example seeing unicorn in clouds.

"Far from being a vision defect, pareidolia has a lot of survival value if you need to quickly spot predators in the jungle, for instance," Seth Shostak.

"Recognizing a crab in a landscape filled with wind-weathered rocks is no more surprising , nor more significant , than seeing a winking face in a semi-colon followed by a parenthesis. ;)" Seth Shostak added.

taken from the same image; That means that this is not a Martian sand or a very lost wampa peeking out from behind rocks a cave either:

There no evidence for life on Mars yet .
so maybe you can do more than scan images ,if you want to help help the hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence you can put your computer's spare processing power to work analyzing narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space, go ahead and take the opportunity from UC Berkeley's SETI@Home .

Learn more here.