Perseverance rover photographs unusual snake-head rock on Mars; can you spot it?

While treading a barren red planet with an aim to find signs of life, the Perseverance Mars rover has found another intriguing feature on Earth's neighbour. In the latest photograph taken by Perseverance's MastCam on June 12, the rover has captured a rock having the shape of a snake's head. According to the rover's mission team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), this new image was captured on Perseverance's 466th day on Mars since its landing last February.

The image was also shared by Dr Jessie Christiansen, an astronomer and a Project Scientist at NASA Exoplanet Archive. In her Twitter post, she even highlighted a small boulder balancing itself on a giant piece of rock as if someone placed it there. "I don't even know what to look at first. WHAT's the deal with that balancing rock. Those rock shelves are SUPER cool", she said in a second tweet. "LOOK how those layers eroded into a snake's head. LOOK HOW THREE DIMENSIONAL IT IS (sic)". 

More interestingly, she converted the intriguing picture into a meme, which featured Rafiki from 'The Lion King' as he holds baby Simba high in the air. 

Pareidolia-inducing images from Mars

Notably, this is not the first time when NASA's rover team has shared pictures sent from Mars which induces Pareidolia in the viewers. Pareidolia is defined as the phenomenon that enables us to see recognizable shapes in objects or data that are otherwise not familiar to us. Earlier in May, NASA's second functional rover Curiosity beamed an image from Mars featuring, what looks like, a mysterious door in a massive wall of rock. Click here to see more of such images. 

As for Perseverance, it has a few years for collecting rock and soil samples before NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) launch a mission to retrieve the Martian contents. The mission is likely to be launched in 2028 and the samples will be brought no earlier than the early or mid-2030s.