At 08:39:44 UTC the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) captured a small “rock” suspended from the ground by a small “stalk”!
The photo was taken from a distance of 7.42 cm with a definition of 0.034 mm/pixel, thus covering an area of 5.36 cm X 3.98 cm.
The strange “rock” is visible in the lower left part of the original image and in the 3X enlargement in which I also lightened a bit the shaded part to improve the visibility of the “stalk”.
The upper part, vaguely similar to the chapel of a mushroom, is no more than 3 mm wide while the “stem” does not exceed half a millimeter in diameter, with these dimensions should be extremely fragile.
Not only I do not understand what geological phenomenon can generate such a thing, but I cannot even understand how something so fragile can remain intact!
I warmly invite you to submit this image to anyone you think can give an interpretation with a minimum of knowledge of the cause.
Personally, if it wasn’t Mars, I’d say it was definitely a mushroom!
To show colors more similar to what the human eye would see, I subjected the image to white balance and a slight increase in microcontrast and color saturation.
Original image: https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/02660/mhli/2660MH0001220011001294C00_DXXX.jpg
This post has been automatically translated. See the original post here.