The European Space Agency recently released an image that appears to show a large number of spiders scuttling across the surface of Mars. The ESA Mars Express spacecraft recently took pictures of these “spiders” close to the Inca City surface formation. “No sign of Ziggy Stardust – but ESA’s Mars Express has snapped the telltale traces of ‘spiders’ scattered across the southern polar region of Mars,” the agency said in a press release.
Naturally, though, these are not spiders at all. The press release claims that they are essentially just tiny, dark-colored features that start to form when sunlight strikes carbon dioxide that has been deposited during the planet’s winter. According to the space agency, the light converts the carbon dioxide ice at the bottom of the deposits into gas, which finally explodes through ice up to three feet thick, launching bursts of dust that resemble geysers before landing on the surface.
While the spots might look tiny from space, they’re actually fairly large, the ESA explained. The space agency said that the patches are as small as 145 feet, at their largest, and might be over half a mile wide. Below those large spots, the arachnid-like pattern is carved beneath the carbon dioxide ice, the ESA said.
Notably, Newsweek reports that the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, which launched in 2016 and has been examining Mars for indications of potential past life, also noticed these spider patterns in 2020. A region of Mars known as “Inca City” is where most of the dark spots seen by the orbiter are located. The region, also known as Angustus Labyrinthus, was found by a NASA probe in 1972 and is located close to the planet’s south polar cap.
The ESA stated that it is unclear how the area was created. Some examples are sand dunes that eventually turned into stone or materials such as sand or magma that seep through rocks.
In the meantime, late 2003 saw the arrival of Mars Express on the Red Planet. The orbiter has mapped the atmosphere of Mars, tracked the history of water on the planet’s surface, examined two small Martian moons in unprecedented detail, and brought back breath-taking three-dimensional views of the planet in the twenty years since its arrival.
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