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NASA’s Perseverance rover has photographed its fair share of strange objects over the year and a half that it has been patrolling the Red Planet.
But the latest transmission from “Percy” is the strangest and most hard-to-explain yet.
A tangle of “space spaghetti” imaged by one of the rover's front-facing hazard avoidance cameras has sparked considerable speculation.
READ MORE: Elon Musk says ticket to Mars would cost about £76,000 and 'almost anyone' can go
NASA experts say the object is most likely a piece of man-made material from the rover’s descent stage.
It wouldn’t be the first time. On June 13, the rover transmitted a photo of a rock that had a strange-looking object stuck to it.
The object was a square of metallic foil covered in mysterious dots.
"My team has spotted something unexpected: It's a piece of a thermal blanket that they think may have come from my descent stage, the rocket-powered jet pack that set me down on landing day back in 2021," the rover team tweeted at the time.
NASA JPL spokesperson Andrew Good told CNET the foil was almost definitely part of a thermal blanket. "Less definite is which part of the spacecraft it came from,” he said. “The team thinks the descent stage is a good possibility – or how exactly it got here.
The descent stage crashed two kilometres away; whether it landed here after that crash or was blown by the wind isn't something we know".
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The “space spaghetti” is probably a scrap of material from a parachute or some other part of the lander, NASA says.
Perseverance’s counterpart, Curiosity, has snapped some amazing sights on Mars.
Conspiracy theorists claim to have spotted coffins, thigh-bones, and most magnificently Bigfoot in the images sent by back NASA’s high tech rover.
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YouTubers Paranormal Crucible, announcing their discovery of the “secret” image published online said by NASA: “Mars does indeed have the ability to sustain exotic life forms.
“With all the images released so far by NASA we can clearly state that life does appear to exist on the red planet.”
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- Space fans joke NASA's Mars Rover has found 'alien sex toy' in odd photo from surface
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