NASA Mars Rover Curiosity Captures Mysterious Bright Spot

A new image of a bright spot captured by NASA's Curiosity on Mars sparked a massive online uproar among UFO enthusiasts. 

The space agency released images captured by NASA's Curiosity rover on April 2 and April 3. These images were taken after its arrival at a waypoint called 'the Kimberley',  inside the Gale Crater on Mars where the rover landed in 2012.

What is striking about these pictures is the mysterious bright spot that is visible on the horizon, in the same west-northwest direction from the rover as the afternoon sun.

"In the thousands of images we've received from Curiosity, we see ones with bright spots nearly every week," Justin Maki of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., leader of the team that built and operates the Navigation Camera, said in a statement. "These can be caused by cosmic-ray hits or sunlight glinting from rock surfaces, as the most likely explanations."

The UFO hunters strongly believe that this fresh evidence reaffirms the presence of extra -terrestrial life. But the space agency dismissed such claims and revealed that the bright spot might be a cosmic ray reflecting off the camera's detector or it could be a glint from a rock reflecting the sun.

DigitalJournal reports that the space agency revealed that the camera on Curiosity  captured what could be artificial light emanating from the planet's surface.

If this bright light is from a glinting rock, the direction of the spot from the unmanned rover suggests that the rock could be on a ridge nearly 160 meters away from the April 3 location.

The spot is only visible in the images taken from the right-eye camera.

 Maki said, "Normally we can quickly identify the likely source of a bright spot in an image based on whether or not it occurs in both images of a stereo pair. In this case, it's not as straightforward because of a blocked view from the second camera on the first day."