There is something a little unsettling about the picture being in NASA‘s public archive for almost three years without being looked at. The picture was taken by the Curiosity rover in Gale Crater on August 20, 2023, which was its 3,924th day of work on Mars. It was uploaded, saved, and mostly forgotten until August 2026, when a user named Kari Sivertzen put it on X, and the internet did what the internet does.
The picture shows what looks like a dark shape that looks like a jellyfish hovering over a distant rocky hill. It looks like it has tentacles that reach down. A raw, grayscale picture taken by Curiosity’s right navigation camera shows it to be about 15 pixels across. But the shape is clear enough that it’s hard to lose sight of once you see it.
The photo is interesting, but not because of the shape itself. The time is right. There is nothing strange in pictures taken less than two minutes ago that were pointed in the same direction. After about 78 minutes, the camera looked again and saw that the shape was gone. It only showed up for one frame and then wasn’t there anymore, whatever it was.
That detail alone helps to tell the difference between the real and fake explanations. Some people who study UFOs have said that it might be proof of a war that happened on Mars a long time ago. They have come up with theories about unexploded missiles and alien weapons technology that is still dormant. NASA hasn’t responded to those claims in a formal way, which is what should be done when rumors are based on a 15-pixel spot in a low-resolution camera image.
To be honest, the more realistic explanations are still pretty cool. Cosmic ray interference is the one that scientists talk about the most. On the surface of Mars, where Curiosity works, there is a lot of radiation, and high-energy particles often hit its CCD detectors. During the calibration step, a cosmic ray hits the sensor and leaves a charge in one spot. That is taken away from the actual exposure by the camera’s processing pipeline, leaving behind a dark shape. The thin, downward-pointing extensions that look so much like tentacles might be caused by charge diffusion along the detector’s pixel columns. It makes sense as an explanation. A similar dark shape was seen in a picture taken by a navigation camera in 2022. At the time, it was noted without much fuss.
You could also have an electronic or transmission glitch, which would mean that a pixel value got messed up somewhere between the camera sensor and the final image file on Earth. The information goes a long way. Any of these things—loss of packets during transmission, temperature spikes near the rover hardware, or small differences in calibration—could cause a dark spot to appear only in one frame. It might not be as exciting as an artifact from a cosmic ray, but it makes just as much sense.
Some people have also suggested a physical reason, like a dust particle moving in front of the camera or even a dust devil going through the frame. But it’s hard to say much more than that without seeing more information from the wind sensors or the left navigation camera. The information is just not there.
Take a moment to think about that gap. Curiosity’s cameras can only take so many pictures, Mars is very far away, and one low-resolution picture without any other information can only tell you so much. There are limits to the science of looking for strange things on another planet that are easy to forget when a picture goes viral and everyone wants a clear answer.
It is most likely that this is some kind of imaging artifact, like a camera glitch, a stray particle, or a transmission error. The cosmic ray theory might be proven true in the future when the engineering logs are looked at. But it’s also possible that no one will look into the case enough to officially close it, and the photo will remain as a strange unanswered side note in the history of Mars exploration.
You get the feeling that these times when something looks just wrong enough to catch your eye are useful. Not because there are jellyfish hovering over the hills on Mars, but because they remind people that Curiosity is still out there, still rolling through Gale Crater and sending back pictures that no one will be able to fully look at for years. That’s strange and important to note.
