Fun Fact Friday - In Honor of Curiosity

I am dedicating this Fun Fact Friday to the pursuit of Science. Also, I feel that Science should be capitalized sometimes. If bitches are going to make God all fancy like, why must science be degraded? But I, as I so often do, digress.

So while Curiosity is up on Mars learning new and exciting things about the planet formerly known as Ma'adim ("the one who blushes" in Hebrew (also, you're welcome for this extra fun fact and these double parentheses)), I decided to learn old but equally exciting things about Mars.

Fun fact: In 1976 Viking I took a picture of Mars that showed a rock formation that looked like a humanoid face.

"Oh, why hello!"

I hope I have not startled you with the above image. I almost peed a little when I saw it. A face? On Mars? It is almost as realistic looking as the smudge of paint in my room that looks like a woolly mammoth! For a while apparently some people thought it (by which I mean the face on Mars, not my pet mammoth) was a monument built by aliens. In 2001, NASA had one of their robot friends take a new picture.

Sneaky, sneaky!

So, no face. Alas! There is no Mount Rushmore equivalent on Mars. The Martian mole people have not deified their leaders by etching their faces into the soil. Either that or they have had a large falling out with the previously hailed ruler and decided to literally wipe his face off the face of the planet. The public is a fickle beast.

Also, though this is not related to faces, while learning about Mars, I came across a fact that said if I were to drive a car at 60 miles per hour it would take me 271 years and 221 days to get to Mars. False. If I were driving a car, I would never get to Mars. Though my purple minivan, Gertrude, is delightful, she cannot drive to Mars. She just doesn't have it in her.