Mysterious Mars Lava Formation Looks Like a Cookie

The Martian landscape is peppered in features that look very alien and often cannot be easily explained.

Take this latest example, as imaged by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which looks like a freshly baked cookie.

This strange circular landform was spotted in the Athabasca region of the Red Planet, where some of the youngest lava flows are known to reside. The feature is around 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) wide and appears to contain some rather lumpy landscaping, whereas the region surrounding it is almost perfectly smooth.

Planetary scientists aren’t sure what caused the ‘cookie,’ but suspect it was ‘baked’ out of the surface material when Mars was volcanically active millions of years ago.

According to a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) news release, the ancient lava flow may have seeped underground, pushing this mound up from below. The lumpiness of the mound may be due to ice being melted out of the surface layers, causing some collapse of material.

There are many strange features like these in Athabasca and, like this peculiar circle, an explanation isn’t easy to come by.

From Discovery News