Imagine that you are viewing a satellite or a planet with a telescope and see unusual flashes on its surface. What it is? A natural phenomenon or a hint of alien activity? If we talk about Mars, then scientists still can not find the exact answer.
It's all aliens!
This image, taken by NASA's Curiosity rover, caused a heated discussion among UFO fans.
As soon as some anomaly occurs on the Red Planet, the aliens are considered the first explanation. It has always been this way, because we still hope to find life on Mars: the one that exists now or the fossil remains.
But a couple of centuries ago the situation was even more complicated. People believed in the existence of the Martians, who can follow us and visit the planet. And the mysterious flashes only confirmed this theory.
For the first time, one of the British astronomers (presumably a man by the name of Illing) spoke of light flashes, who in December 1896 noticed a strange bright glow on the Martian surface. It is interesting that two years later the novel “War of the Worlds” came out, in which a series of Martian flares served as the moment of launch of alien invader ships that set off to Earth. It is believed that HG Wells could use real fact as a storyline (we are talking about outbreaks, not aggressive aliens).
The second observer was the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Barabashov, who in 1924 was able to observe not just a flash, but a bright band that lasted more than 4 minutes in the review. The next 5-minute record was a powerful bluish-white flash of 1937.
The last remarkable event happened in 1956, where a bright and long-lasting flash was lucky to be caught by Soviet astronomers. And then everything calmed down ... Researchers tried to understand what they were dealing with, but the nature of the light events remained unsolved.
What are the explanations?
This is an image from a navigation camera (Navcam) on NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover with a bright spot in the upper left corner. The sun is in the same direction. Bright spots appear on the images of the rover almost every week. A typical explanation for them are cosmic rays incident on a light detector, or sunlight shining from stones.
First of all, natural events should be considered. Therefore, scientists have seized upon the possible volcanic activity or the fall of large meteorites. However, the telescopic survey did not reveal any traces (lava or craters).
It was also suggested that the whole thing in the ice crystals, which are present on the Red Planet in the winter. They create an increased reflectivity and send us a concentrated bright light. However, no one can say why the events are so short-lived? And if this is something natural, then how to explain the lack of repetition after 1956? An exotic origin is alien origin, which ufologists firmly grasped. In this case, the Martians go about their business on their home planet, and the outbreaks serve as confirmation of their activity. Why did it stop? Perhaps they just flew away somewhere else (maybe they were disturbed by annoying earthmen who are peeping through a telescope?). Then flashes marked the moments of rocket launches, the last of which was launched in 1956. But this is more of a plot for another fiction novel.
Contemporary Event
Bright spots appear in separate frames received by the rover’s navigation camera on April 2-3. Each spot flashes in the photos taken by the right stereo camera, but not in the images taken by the left (with a duration of a second). In two pictures of the right stereo camera, the spot is located in different places of the frame and at the level of the surface in front of the edge of the crater on the horizon. Light is believed to be a glare from a rocky surface, reflected by the Sun. At the time of the shooting, the star was in the same direction as the bright spot — to the west-north-west of the rover.
Now there are artificial rovers on Mars that are exploring the planet. For all the time of study, researchers have so far failed to find Martian representatives or at least some man-made objects. However, in April 2014, the Curiosity unit noticed an anomalous bright spot, which was photographed on its cameras. But the crew of the spacecraft immediately abandoned the possible alien origin. They referred to problems in the equipment or light close, reflected from the surface of the rover. There were also suspicions that this is a reflection of the sun's rays from the rim of the crater. But the place of the event was located far away, and the scientists decided not to change the course of the apparatus.
Postscript
Now the flashes on Mars are not fixed and the researchers still can not explain what it was. However, similar phenomena noticed on the moon. This again proves that we still know too little about the neighborhood. Therefore, future space conquerors will see a lot of interesting things.
