Look closely at this image.
It’s Mars, Gale Crater, August 20, 2023. The Curiosity rover’s navigation camera captured a dark silhouette with a sort of round head and dangling filaments, as if something had stopped right there. Three years later, someone uploaded it to social media again and the entire internet started talking about a ‘Martian jellyfish’
But there’s a problem for fans of extraterrestrial life: two photos taken just 13 and 25 seconds earlier show nothing. And 78 minutes later, neither does one. Astrophysicist Joseph Farah examined the pixels and found a perfectly aligned streak, without smoothing, typical of an energetic particle striking the sensor. Mars has no magnetic field to protect it, so cosmic rays hit the camera directly.
It’s not a creature. It’s the universe leaving an invisible mark on a lens 225 million kilometers from home.
