In May 2022, information resources around the world circulated the news: a mysterious portal was discovered in one of the photographs taken by the Curiosity rover. We checked whether this relief feature can really be characterized in this way.

Here's what some media reported: “The Curiosity rover sent a picture from Mars that shows a strange object that looks like a door or passage. It has already been dubbed “the door to the temple” on social networks. The object was discovered in a photo from the Curiosity rover's Mastcam camera, which it took on May 7. In the photo, the rock structure has smooth rectangular shapes, similar to an artificially made entrance. NASA has not yet commented on the image, and its scale is unclear.”

In this or a slightly different vein, this news was presented by such resources as ixbt.com, "Very", "Tsargrad", "Profile", hi-tech and some other sources. The message about the discovery of a supposedly artificial entrance gained great popularity on Reddit.

Indeed, on the official NASA website there is snapshot, taken, according to the description, on May 7, 2022 at 07:58 GMT and outwardly completely coincides with those images that are circulating on the Internet.

But how correct is it to consider the mysterious rectangular element in this photograph as some kind of entrance? This question interested journalists, and they turned to scientists for an answer. The Curiosity rover from which the image was taken operates as part of a large-scale project called the Mars Science Laboratory. Member of this project Ashwin Vasavada stated, that in front of us in the picture “is just a space between two cracks in the rock.” He added that the rift is about 30 cm high and was formed after compactions of Martian dunes were buried under sands and subjected to unequal pressure at different points. “The faults we see in this area are usually vertical,” he explained.

Similar opinion expressed Another scientist working with Curiosity is professor of geosciences Sajeev Gupta from Imperial College London. He is convinced that the excavation was formed as a result of natural geological processes.

With my colleagues agree and scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of NASA's research centers. They only slightly adjusted the scale of the “door” - to 45 cm in height and 30 cm in width. Nevertheless, all researchers are unanimous in the opinion that what we have in front of us is nothing more than a natural detail of the Martian relief, and quite small in size. You can evaluate its location on a color mosaic, stitched together from publicly available photographs of this section of the Martian surface.

Cover image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.