People keep talking about “pareidolia” in relation to this image but that’s not what is interesting. It is definitely “pareidolia” with respect to those “fossilized iguana” and “Obama’s head” formations.
Ok - so take away the “spoon” thing, that would be the “pareidolia” part. But it still seems a very bizarre rock formation, tethered on only one side to the ground. Since I presume the scale is fairly big, the formation is probably huge. I guess the lower gravity on Mars allows such a thing to exist, but still - interesting.
It doesn’t look huge to me, looks like eroded sandstone, at a guess I wouldn’t put that “spoon” at anything beyond 20 or 30 centimeters in length.
It looks a bit weird, but keep in mind Mars gravity is less than 40% of what we get here on Earth.
Hm, I thought for some reason that was a satellite picture. Do you have a link to some sort of explanation of the scale on the “floating spoon” pic? If it is that small then true, it is much less interesting.
This article in Forbes says it is an image from the Curiosity rover. If you look at the lower right corner of the uncropped Forbes picture, I believe there is a bit of the shadow of the rover itself.
Look at it upside down. It isn’t floating.
Seen upside down, craters appear to be mountains and vice versa. I believe it depends upon the angle of light.
Off topic but god damn that “obama head” one is a hell of a thing. Probably the only image like these I’ve seen where if you hadn’t told me it was a rock I would have thought “this is a head” rather than ‘this is something that looks like a head’.
That picture has lots of other overhanging features with shadows below them. The “spoon” feature is the only one stretching so far out, but there are two thicker “branches” of stone on the right edge that are about half of the spoon’s length.
Looks like a layer of hard rock on top of a softer rock. As the softer rock eroded from under, bits of the harder rock held together.
Maybe so, but if you look just to the right of ‘Obama’, you can clearly see the bottom half of Teddy Roosevelt’s face, looking straight towards the camera.
