You probably might remember Henry Paterson’s Mystery Flower On Mars post last month where pictures of a mold-like flower were taken on the Martian surface. Today, another photograph depicting an anomalous object was found. It’s not a flower or a rock that looks like Bigfoot. It’s a very peculiar object that look metal, almost man-made.

The photograph is credited to NASA / JPL and can be found here. I have to admit, most of the anomalous images from Mars that have made their way across my inbox have nothing compared to this one. Whatever that object is, it looks artificial and metallic. I sure would love to hear NASA explain this one.

UniverseToday has a nice writeup on this story:

The Curiosity Mars rover has found some strange-looking little things on Mars – you’ve likely heard of the Mars ‘flower,’ the piece of benign plastic from the rover itself, and other bright flecks of granules in the Martian soil. Now the rover has imaged a small metallic-looking protuberance on a rock. Visible in the image above (the green lines point to it), the protuberance appears to have a high albedo and even projects a shadow on the rock below. The image was taken with the right Mastcam on Curiosity on Sol 173 — January 30, 2013 here on Earth — (see the original raw image here), and was pointed out to us by Elisabetta Bonora, an image editing enthusiast from Italy.