Deep down, we all believe Earth is a beautiful place. A blue marble soaked with refreshing blue water, still covered in luxuriant green trees, and draped in places by vast expanses of golden sand. All these features are however just a sort of fancy clothing for the single planet we know of capable of supporting life, which if stripped of all its beauty, it’d probably be as bizarre and alien as Mars.
They call it Hellas Planitia, and to our best knowledge, it occupies a place in the top five largest impact craters in the Solar System. It’s also home to “an enigmatic formation” called banded terrain, to use the phrasing of the scientists studying the planet.
Take a quick, undocumented look at the main image of this piece, and somewhere in the bright yellow middle your brain will compose the shape of some kind of alien hound with fat front legs, jumping over some invisible crevasse, or that of a winged beast sweeping down on its prey, or of a fish swimming in opposite direction from the other two. Something not unlike of an alien equivalent of a cave painting, if you will.
The advancements made in space exploration technology presently allow us to see the celestial bodies in ways we weren’t capable of seeing them before. And with Mars being the focus of so many exploratory missions, we now have the chance of experiencing the place in all sorts of new ways, and that makes the planet even more appealing for those wishing to one day go there.
After ages of uncertainty, we now know for a fact that presently there is no sign of existing intelligent life on Mars. Yet one can’t help from thinking about how that might have been, if it ever existed, when images such as the one we have here are released by the people who are constantly surveying the planet.