Did NASA find a jellyfish on Mars?

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I'm quite proud of this debunk--we managed to change the texture of the misinformation that was spreading about this anomaly. The things that were key for the success of this campaign were how quickly we put together a response and the very specific targeting of the communities engaging with the explanations at a friendly level. I would like to reflect more on this, and what lessons can be learned for how academia as a whole can respond to rapid misinformation/disinformation. The script of the video is below.

August 20th, 2023. Sol 3924. The Navigation Camera onboard NASA's Mars rover Curiosity photographed what appears to be an unusual structure or creature in the far distance, wandering the Martian surface. The strange shape of the object seems unlike anything seen on Mars and has recently been making the rounds on various internet forums. At first it was proposed that the object could be the NASA Ingenuity Martian helicopter, but that helicopter was over 2000 miles away when this picture was taken. UFO enthusiasts note the strange tripod like-shape, which some claim resembles a jellyfish-like being, a mechanical device, or a large black body perched atop two spindly legs; the seemingly improbable location, which has the object hovering directly above the ground in the distance; and the fact that the object is not present in an image taken earlier at the exact same location, which is being interpreted as evidence of a mobile life form or machine. What is it really? 

DEBUNK

This is an older image that has been making the rounds lately, thanks to a few posts on reddit and some new amplification from tabloids like The Daily Mail, which published the responsible and level-headed headline, "Mysterious 'jellyfish' spotted in NASA Mars photo sparks theories of life on the Red Planet". Reading through the comments from UFO and alien life enthusiasts, I spotted a lot of interesting methodological problems in the way the discussions were being handled that I think are actually quite instructive. So can we figure out what this thing is, and if we can't, does that mean it is aliens?

Let's look at the evidence. First, it's objectively there. There's clearly something in the actual image from NASA that needs to be explained. This isn't an editing artifact or something someone photoshopped. Something in real life happened, and the camera recorded it. And it was something that wasn't there before, in the previous image. That's a big part I think of why this is gaining so much steam and attention.

Second, the location does seem rather odd. I saw a lot of comments saying things like, "what are the odds that a glitch or something similar would be perfectly hovering above the landscape, with its tendrils reaching down like a tripod?" And that does seem a little unusual. But without characterizing what this could be, its hard to say whether its really that unusual. And I'll to that in a minute, because I think this is an extremely common but very poorly understood source of bias in how human beings interpret low-sample data.

Finally, the shape. I'll admit, it really does look like something straight out of War of the Worlds. But this is a pretty well understood human perception thing. We like to see patterns and shapes and so we do--everywhere. Even in the random things, like the stars in the night sky, or the random inkblots of the Rorschach test. 

But while the 3 things I mentioned have been shared as "evidence", they aren't really. I don't mean they don't mean aliens, I hope that's obvious at this point in the video, I mean they aren't telling you anything. The people who are commenting that its not there in the previous image and therefore it must be moving are neglecting the fact that the previous image was taken just 13 seconds earlier, which feels like if it is a big creature in the distance moving, that would be kind of fast. Especially since the "jellyfish" or "moving body" explanation would suggest its moving from right to left, pretty far away--that's a lot of ground to cover in 13 seconds, with no motion blur.

And as for the shape, a lot of what we are perceiving as the "shape" is due to intentional or accidental blurring or processing of the image as we zoom in on it or as people try to enhance it with various programs. But you can look at it pixel by pixel, using several freely available online tools. If we do this, we find that it does look weird, but it certainly doesn't look like a jellyfish or a tripod. There is an almost perfectly black line of pixels--and when I say perfectly black I mean the pixel values are (0, 0, 0) for some of these--with a fuzzy single streak looking thing below it. I don't see the "tripod" at all in this view. In fact, the two other "legs" of what I assume are the "tripod" that people are talking about are just consistent with the sky noise. Also, looking closer, unlike every other object in the image, which has some level of antialiasing (which is when the edges of real-life objects don't get perfectly terminated on a pixel, they kind of get blurred a little) the anomaly is a single row of a couple pixels perfectly terminating at the pixel boundary, without any sign of the antialiasing-like effect that a real object would have. So while there's definitely some signal here, we have been grossly misleading ourselves about the shape and structure, and even whether this is a real object in the camera. 

But now we have the actual shape and structure, as we can we see here. What could cause a perfectly black row of pixels with a fuzzy streak below it? and can it explain some of the other weirdness, like the suspicious location, or the fact that its not there just a few moments earlier?

EXPLANATION

In my opinion as an astrophysicist, this is not a real object at all. I think this is just a camera glitch. And a very specific kind of camera glitch caused by something called a "cosmic ray". 

See, space is filled with very high energy, fast moving particles. And sometimes--a lot of the time actually--those particles hit things. When a cosmic ray hits Earth's atmosphere, it creates a shower of secondary particles that can be detected even at the Earth's surface. We don't exactly know where they come from, but we see a LOT of them, and they seem to be coming from deep space and from the Sun.

So, how can cosmic rays create camera glitches? Well it comes down to how cameras work. Here is an overly simplified explanation. The sensor of a camera is something called a charge-coupled device, or CCD. When a photon enters a camera sensor and strikes a pixel, that photon interacts with a little piece of silicon that generates an electron. That electron is then captured by a capacitor during the exposure. The more photons interact with the little piece of silicon, the more electrons are generated and captured. When the exposure is done, the camera computer "reads out" the number of electrons counted at each pixel, and the number of electrons there are tells you the number of photons. So, more electrons, means a brighter pixel. Doing this for every pixel in the sensor across the red, green and blue pixels, gives you a whole image. 

The problem is, photons aren't the only thing that can generate electrons. If a cosmic ray--which we don't care about in a picture--strikes the camera at the right angle, it can create a huge number of electrons across several pixels in the image. This is almost always far more electrons than the scene would normally generate, and so when the camera reads out the image, you'll get a big white streak that can come in many different shapes and sizes and configurations, basically anywhere in the image. 

So basically what I think happened is a cosmic ray struck the camera at the exact right moment and left this big ol artifact in the image. It explains why the shape is so weird--just a perfect row of pixels with no antialiasing-- and why it wasn't present just 13 seconds earlier--a cosmic ray strike is a tiny fraction of a second event--and it also explains a few other weird things. For example, you might be wondering why is the cosmic ray artifact black here, when all the other images I've showed you so far have been white streaks. Well, NASA cameras are pretty brilliant things. As part of the process of taking an image, they take something called a "dark bias frame", which is an image taken with the camera shutter closed, to create a calibration frame that is then subtracted from the actual image. The idea here is the temperature of the environment and the camera itself can create a low-level background of photons that we don't want in our images. So by taking a picture with the shutter closed, we can measure the background that will be present in our image with the shutter open, and subtract it away to make the image more accurate. 

But, if a cosmic ray strikes the camera while the bias frame is being taken, it will create a HUGE white artifact. When that artifact is then subtracted from the real image, it will leave a pitch black remnant. 

The cosmic ray explanation can also explain the strange location--in that, there's nothing to explain at all. Cosmic ray hits are very frequent. They happen all the time in every instrument. They are especially frequent on Mars, which has a thin atmosphere and weaker magnetic field than Earth's, making it worse at impinging the propagation of these rays. They happen all the time, at random spots in the images, meaning that eventually, you'll get one that seems to be in a suspicious spot, purely by chance, especially if its over the sky, where a black artifact will show up more clearly. But if you look at the anomaly as an individual event and try to say "oh, what are the odds that this happened right at this perfect spot", you can fool yourself into thinking that the event is rarer than it is. Another way to think about it is like seeing a strangely shaped cloud that looks exactly like something crazy. Intuitively, we know that while it feels rare, but we also know that any given SECOND there are billions and billions of clouds each with a different shape and so suddenly a particular shape being unusual doesn't seem that unlikely.

And this something that astrophysicists have to deal with too. In a recent paper we published, we found a really strange signal--the first of its kind. We did our best to characterize it and convince ourselves that the signal was real, which wasn't so hard because the data were really high quality and the signal was very strong and occurred over a long time--over 100 days. But even though it was a very exciting find, the consensus of the community--including us, the authors--was that the only way to know for sure that this isn't a fluke is to find more of them. And even our followup work now is trying to find different ways to assess whether the signal could be real or just some type of noise. So this is something that happens all the time, and once you see how much random stuff the universe is capable of throwing at you that looks exactly like something incredible but turns out to be something kind of mundane, you sort of learn that it is much easier to trick yourself that you've proved something than it is to actually prove something beyond a shadow of a doubt. As a famous physicist once said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and that you are the easiest person to fool."

This idea of finding more similar events to show that your explanation is not a fluke leads perfectly into the final piece of this puzzle, which is that we've seen stuff like this a TON on Mars and elsewhere. Here are just a few examples that NASA themselves have published of cosmic ray streaks appearing in their cameras. Here are some that look quite similar to the strange jellyfish one we've been discussing today, complete with pitch black cores and strange dangling appendages and streaks. And to really nail it home, here is an email from Justin Maki, the engineering lead for the MSL camera, responding to a question from an enthusiast about a very similar artifact identified just a year earlier, confirming that these strange streaks are indeed cosmic rays striking the sensor during the acquisition of a dark bias frame. So that's where my money for this one, too.

Previously on this blog:

•  Thermal vacuum testing for the Europa Clipper 
•  Coronal mass ejection from colossal New Year's Eve solar flare will strike Earth today 
•  Saturn's icy moon may hold the building blocks of life 
•  Global Geomagnetic Perturbation Forecasting Using Deep Learning 
•  LCO Data Confirm the Success of NASA’s DART Mission 
•  James Webb captures an extremely distant triple-lensed supernova 
•  SWPC Reports X-Class Solar Flare