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Nasa shares picture of unusual hole in Mars that could ‘contain Martian life’

Holes – and the caves they could be an entrance to – have prompted speculation as possible shelters from the harsh environment of the red planet

Wednesday 04 March 2020 12:35 GMT

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Nasa reveals picture of unusual hole in Mars that could ‘contain Martian life’

Nasa has shared a picture of an "unusual" hole in the Martian surface that could serve as a home for life.

The hole appears to be the entrance to a larger underground cavern, which can be seen a little in the image and could serve as protection

The image was discovered in 2011, by chance – it was spotted as art of a broader series of images, taken of the slopes of Mars' Pavonis Mons volcano, using the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that continues to orbit around the planet to this day.

When the hole was discovered, Nasa conducted further analysis that suggested the cavern goes around 20 meters deep. It could not find an explanation for the circular crater that surrounds the hole – or a proper estimate of just how far the underlying cavern might extend.

"Holes such as this are of particular interest because their interior caves are relatively protected from the harsh surface of Mars, making them relatively good candidates to contain Martian life," Nasa wrote on its Astronomy Picture of the Day page, where it shared the image this week.

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

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1/10Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Mystic Mountain, a pillar of gas and dust standing at three-light-years tall, bursting with jets of gas from fledgling stars buried within, was captured by Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope in February 2010

Nasa/ESA/STScI

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The first ever selfie taken on an alien planet, captured by Nasa's Curiosity Rover in the early days of its mission to explore Mars in 2012

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Death of a star: This image from Nasa's Chandra X-ray telescope shows the supernova of Tycho, a star in our Milky Way galaxy

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Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Arrokoth, the most distant object ever explored, pictured here on 1 January 2019 by a camera on Nasa's New Horizons spaceraft at a distance of 4.1 billion miles from Earth

Getty

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory in January 2012. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust

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Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

The first ever image of a black hole, captured by the Event Horizon telescope, as part of a global collaboration involving Nasa, and released on 10 April 2019. The image reveals the black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides about 54 million light-years from Earth

Getty

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Pluto, as pictured by Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft as it flew over the dwarf planet for the first time ever in July 2015

Nasa/APL/SwRI

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

A coronal mass ejection as seen by the Chandra Observatory in 2019. This is the first time that Chandra has detected this phenomenon from a star other than the Sun

Nasa

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Dark, narrow, 100 meter-long streaks running downhill on the surface Mars were believed to be evidence of contemporary flowing water. It has since been suggested that they may instead be formed by flowing sand

Nasa/JPL/University of Arizona

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Morning Aurora: Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station in October 2015

Nasa/Scott Kelly

"These pits are therefore prime targets for possible future spacecraft, robots, and even human interplanetary explorers."

In the time since the image was taken, Nasa has continued to scour the surface of Mars for more possible cave openings on the surface.

The hunt is by extension a mission to look for potential underground habitats, since researchers speculate that while there is no evidence of alien life on the surface, it could be hidden underneath the red planet.

Caverns could also be useful places for future human explorers to shelter from the harsh environment on the Martian surface.

Those explorers could also examine the materials found in those caverns. Since they could include material left their from previous epochs, they may prove a useful way of looking back into Mars' past.

Nasa is only recently starting to dig unto the large unexplored world beneath the Martian surface. Last week, it showed off the first findings from the InSight spacecraft, which revealed that Mars was seismically active and more, in findings that could help reveal how the red planet was formed.

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