Yet a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab points out that while the light appears in the images taken by the rover camera’s “right-eye,” it doesn’t appear in images taken only seconds later by the camera’s “left-eye.” To the JPL scientist, Dr. Justin Maki, the facts suggest the light is not evidence of alien life at all. His theory? “One possibility is that the light is the glint from a rock surface reflecting the sun,” Maki told The Huffington Post in an email. “When these images were taken each day, the sun was in the same direction as the bright spot, west-northwest from the rover, and relatively low in the sky.” The light could also be simply a photographic artifact resulting from the “charge-coupled device” (CCD) that the camera uses to capture images. Others have suggested the culprit may be cosmic rays –charged atomic particles in space– that smashed into the camera’s detector.
