Elephant on Mars - High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE)

 Elephant on Mars Sculpted by Lava Flow (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

The dried flood of lava over the exterior of Mars has created the spitting figure of the eye and trunk of an elephant.

The arc of the animal's forehead and the dent of an ear also appear in a new photograph taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

"This is a fine example of the phenomena 'pareidolia,' somewhere we see things (such as animals) that aren't actually there," University of Arizona planetary geologist Alfred McEwen wrote in an modernize posted on the university's HiRISE website.

The Mars elephant illusion snap shows a section of the Red Planet called the Elysium Planitia, which is the youngest flood-lava region on Mars.

Scientists aren't confident if the lava flows on Mars were deposited rapidly, or over a longer moment in time period, as is the case on Earth, wherever most lava floods were put in position over years to decades.

"This is most likely accurate for much of the lava on Mars as well," McEwen wrote. "An elephant can walk away from the gradually advancing flow front. However, there is as well proof for much more rapidly flowing lava on Mars, a right flood of lava. In this case, maybe this elephant couldn't run away quick enough."

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been rotating the Red Planet since 2006, was launched in 2005. The orbiter, at present in an extensive phase of its mission, has transmitted additional data to Earth than all further interplanetary missions combined, NASA officials have said.

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NASA's spaceship captures a gigantic Solar Tornado on Film

NASA's spaceship captures a gigantic Solar Tornado on Film

It's one of the great fun information about space, and you may be educated it in third grade: the planet Jupiter is home to a massive, long-lasting cyclone known as the Great Red Spot, so massive that it could swallow up three Earths. The Spot may have been covered as early as 1665 and was seen for in no doubt in 1830. Since the arrival of recent telescopes and space probes, astronomers have found heated weather conditions all over the solar system, as well as storms on Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Venus. Even Mars, with hardly any environment to articulate of, is repeatedly swept by extremely large dust storms. 

In short, the idea of tempests on other planets is attractive much a yawn these days. But even for the cosmically fed-up, new information out of NASA's orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory is tough to ignore. On Sept. 25, the spaceship recorded a huge storm on the sun - a storm five times the width of Earth, reaching high into the solar atmosphere, with winds clocked at a burning 300,000 km/h (186,000 m.p.h.). “Burning," in this case, is not literal term: the gases entrained in the storm reached a probably 2,000,000°C - that's 3,600,000°F, even though at temperatures like that, the degree only just matters. The tornado lasted at least 3 hours, and traveled about 200,000 km (125,000 miles) - and there's a movie, the first ever filmed of such a storm, to prove it. 

Unlike twisters on Earth, which are natural out of roiling manner, the solar variety is triggered by powerful attractive storms. In fact, tornadoes on the sun often show up in the same places as coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, the eruptions that send blobs of electric particles out into space - and all too regularly, straight toward our planet. Solar astrophysicists even think the tornadoes may well perform as triggers for CMEs. 

Now that scientists have filmed one solar storm, they'll be on bewaring for more. Given the damage CMEs can cause on interactions networks on Earth, it could pay to have the best potential sense of when the next one might be coming.