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NASA’s Curiosity rover is on an 11-year (and counting) mission to seek out (maybe) new life and new (microbial) civilizations. It has boldly gone where no one has gone before.
So it should come as no surprise to Trekkies that the stalwart explorer recently came upon a rock in the form of the delta-shaped Star Trek symbol that is the insignia and communicator badge of characters in the long-running science-fiction series.
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The coincidental discovery (and it would be highly illogical to assume it was anything but a coincidence) was made by amateur astronomer Scott Atkinson, who posted it to his feed on X, formerly Twitter.
“I bet Star Trek fans on the @MarsCuriosity team smiled like Cheshire Cats when they saw this new image appear on their screens,” he wrote, alongside a picture of the rock formation in question.
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The image was taken by the rover’s left navigation camera on its 4,062nd sol (or day) on Mars, which corresponded to Jan. 9 on Earth.
It’s not even the first time such an image has been spotted on the red planet. In 2019, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took a picture of a Trek-shaped lava formation from space.
It was located in a region of Mars known as Hellas Planitia, which is unfortunately thousands of kilometres away from the much larger Utopia Planitia. That’s the site (in the Star Trek universe) of a major shipyard.
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