NASA spacecraft spots Star Trek logo on Mars

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has discovered a dune in the shape of Starfleet --- the famous logo from Star Trek --- on Mars, a new picture from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) showed. The University of Arizona, which operates the MRO HiRISE camera, said: “Enterprising viewers will make the discovery that these features look conspicuously like a famous logo… You'd be right, but it's only a coincidence.”

The spotting of the logo can be paralleled to the “face on Mars” phenomenon. This could be a fluke occurrence caused by the movement of wind, lava, and other natural forces that sculpt the landscape of the Red Planet.

The dune feature is located in , a large plain within the Hellas impact basin in the southern hemisphere of Mars. An interaction of dunes, lava and wind formed the chevron shape visible in the picture, according to the statement. MRO has photographed many other chevrons on Mars, so we're guessing this is not the first time it spotted one shaped like a "Star Trek" logo, the Space.com reported.

Scientists working with the HiRISE instrument have spent years studying the features they see in Mars images, and they think they have a good sense of how this particular shape came to be. The story starts with crescent-shaped sand dunes where wind and surface interacted.

The statement from the University further explains: “However, since they are still just dunes, and the winds do keep blowing, the sand piles wither away, leaving behind what looks like ‘footprints’ in the lava plain.

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