“Juno” photographed a “sad face” on the planet Jupiter
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The automatic interplanetary station Juno, flying past Jupiter, took a photograph of its surface, in which the clouds of the gas giant resemble a face.
The phenomenon that makes you “recognize” something familiar (often just faces) in mysterious and unfamiliar outlines is called pareidolia. This psychological illusion is a kind of “side effect” of the mechanism that allows the human consciousness to extract the maximum data from incomplete information.
It is pareidolia that owes its popularity to the pseudoscientific news of ufologists who “discover” representatives of local fauna or aliens on the Moon or Mars, mistaking relief features or unusual shadows for them.
Juno was the first spacecraft in more than a decade designed to study Jupiter at close range. The research station was launched to the planet on August 5, 2011, and almost five years later entered its orbit. It is planned that in February 2018 the spacecraft will complete its work and burn up in the atmosphere of the largest planet in the solar system.
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