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

Here is what some media reported: “The Curiosity Mars -Road sent a picture from Mars, which depicts a strange object similar to the door or passage. In social networks, he was already dubbed "doors to the temple." The object was discovered in the photo from the MastCAM camera of the Curiosity Markhod, which he made on May 7. In the photo, the rocky structure has even rectangular shapes, similar to an artificially made entrance. NASA has not yet commented on a picture, its scale is also incomprehensible. ”

In this or slightly different way, this news was given by resources such as ixbt.com, "Very", "Tsargrad", "Profile", Hi-Tech And some other sources. The discovery message about the discovery of the allegedly artificial entrance was most popular at Reddit.

Indeed, on the official website of NASA is posted picture, made, according to the description, on May 7, 2022 at 07:58 by Greenwich time and outwardly completely coinciding with those images that walk over the network.

But how correctly it is to consider the mysterious rectangular element in this photo by a certain entrance? This question was interested in journalists, and they turned to scientists for an answer. The Curiosity Mars -Road, from which the picture was taken, is functioning as part of a large -scale project called the Martian Scientific Laboratory. Member of this project Ashvin Vasavada declaredthat in front of us is in the picture "just the space between the two cracks in the rock." He added that the collapse has a height of about 30 cm and formed after the seals of the Martian dunes were buried under the sands and underwent unequal pressure at different points. “The faults that we see in this area are usually vertical,” he explained.

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

With your colleagues agree and scientists from the laboratory of reactive movement-one of the NASA research centers. They only slightly corrected the scale of the “doors” - up to 45 cm in height and 30 cm in width. Nevertheless, all researchers are unanimous in the opinion that we have nothing more than the natural detail of the Martian relief, while quite small sizes. You can evaluate its location on color mosaicglued from public photographs of this section of the Martian surface.

The image on the cover: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS.