Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS, image processed by Vladimir Tarasov
Over the years, NASA has sent all kinds of crafts into outer space to study the cosmos, and along with valuable information about everything from planets to asteroids to galaxies to black holes, the crafts have sent back a fair share of strange images and videos. On Mars alone, rovers have photographed odd carvings, an "alien boot," a mysterious doorway, a "lightsaber," metallic wreckage, "alien arms," a flying UFO, an "alien" statue, a crashed "saucer," and even what looks like an actual alien. Now, a haunting image has come from Mars' neighbor, Jupiter.
As NASA's Juno spacecraft has been orbiting the Milky Way's largest planet, it's been transmitting images back to Earth, and the space agency just shared a particularly odd one. It seems to show a haunting face. In a press release, NASA said the photo is actually "turbulent clouds and storms along Jupiter's terminator, the dividing line between the day and night sides of the planet." They added, "The low angle of sunlight highlights the complex topography of features in this region, which scientists have studied to better understand the processes playing out in Jupiter’s atmosphere."
As for why it looks like an eerie face, NASA wrote it off to pareidolia, what they explain is "the effect that causes observers to perceive faces or other patterns in largely random patterns."
There are actually tons of photos of Jupiter that the spacecraft's JunoCam as sent back. You can look through all of them on the Mission Juno website. Maybe you'll find something even more bizarre than the face.