NASA's Curiosity Rover Spotted a 'Doorway' on Mars

NASA's rover took a picture of a feature on the surface of Mars that looked like it could lead into the Martian underground.

The image was taken on May 7 by the Mast cam while it was on Mount Sharp. The black-and-white image may have conspiracy theorists over the moon, but it doesn't show the entrance to an underground alien society.

In a phone call today, Ashwin Vasavada said that it was just the space between two fractured rocks. The formation is not the entrance to a video game, according to Vasavada, a project scientist in the Mars Science Laboratory. Over time, the sand dunes became sandstone outcrops.

Vasavada told us that the sand dunes were buried and unburied as the sand on Mars shifted. The sandstone was under different pressures, causing it to break in different places. The doorway-shaped fracture is likely to have formed in one of two ways.

Vasavada said that there are either two vertical fractured, where the middle piece has been removed, or one vertical fractured, where the blocks have moved apart.